How this site is built
Short answer: by hand, and on purpose. Lean is a design decision here, not a lack of one. Here is the type, the color, and the thinking it's made of.
Built lean, on purpose
This site is hand-written: HTML, CSS, and a little vanilla JavaScript, served as static files. That is a deliberate choice. A framework and a build pipeline would add weight, moving parts, and things to break, and buy a site this size nothing in return. So there is no framework, no bundler, and no node_modules the size of a small moon. Edit a file, refresh, done.
The payoff is real, not aesthetic: pages load instantly, there is almost nothing that can fail between the file and your screen, and this will still run untouched years from now. Restraint is the feature.
Every kilobyte here is one we chose to send.
- MarkupSemantic HTML, written by hand.
- StylesPlain CSS with custom properties for color and type. One shared
site.css; no preprocessor. - ScriptsA little vanilla JS for small flourishes. Progressive: the site works fine without it.
- BuildNone. What ships is what you'd see in the editor. Nothing to compile, nothing to go stale.
- WeightKept small on purpose. Fonts plus a couple of tiny scripts, and that's the budget. Fast on any connection.
- HostingStatic files on Cloudflare Pages.
- AnalyticsBasic, privacy-respecting measurement: page views and rough region. No heatmaps, no session recording, no cross-site tracking, nothing sold.
- FontsServed from Google Fonts. Together with our analytics beacon, that is the whole list of remote origins for these pages.
- MotionRespects
prefers-reduced-motion. Ask for calm and the site holds still.
Transparency, measured live
Rather than just tell you this site is light on third parties, here is the actual count, measured in your own browser as this page loaded. Hover it to see exactly which origins those are.
The list is short: Google, for the fonts, and our analytics beacon, which shows up in this count whenever it is running. Nothing is hidden from this number, and that is the whole point. See the privacy page for what the analytics measures.
Type
Four faces, each with one job. Assigning type by role, rather than reaching for a single do-everything family, is most of what makes the pages feel deliberate.
Color
A cool, graphite world with a single violet doing the accent work: deep Ink violet on light surfaces, and its brighter sibling reserved for the dark band, where it can glow without shouting.
A note on how it was made
This site was crafted carefully, and AI-assisted, which we're happy to say out loud. A person made the decisions, held the taste, and sweated the details; an AI assistant helped with the typing and the tedium. We think that's a fine way to build a small thing well, and we'd rather tell you than pretend otherwise. If you spot a rough edge, that one's on us, not the robot.