Colophon

How this site is built.

This site is hand-written, on purpose. No CMS, no theme — just Astro, a typography stack I actually like, and a small content collection per surface so additions stay cheap.

Framework

Astro 5 (SSG)

Content collections + glob loaders. Pages are `.astro` with islands when truly needed.

Styling

Tailwind CSS v4 (Vite plugin)

Custom palette: ink, paper, rust, moss, skyline, plum. No prebuilt component kit.

Type

Space Grotesk + Inter

Space Grotesk for display headings, Inter for body. Both self-hosted as variable WOFF2; the display face is preloaded.

MDX & content

astro:content + MDX

Posts, projects, talks, research, books, movies, and traces — each its own zod-typed collection.

Hosting

Cloudflare Pages

Static export via `astro build`, deployed with Wrangler. Fast TTFB everywhere.

Analytics

PostHog (EU)

Self-hosted snippet, only public token in the bundle. No third-party fingerprinters.

Build-time data

GitHub + Hardcover + Medium

Contribution graph, reading shelf, and Medium feed are fetched at build, not at request time.

AI co-pilots

Claude Code + Codex

Most refactors and these new pages were paired with Claude Code; Codex used for a second opinion on tricky regex/SQL.

Performance budget

JS shipped

~0KB on most pages

Only Mermaid (lazy) and the PostHog snippet load JS.

Images

Resized WebP at build

Talk, run, press, and post photos live in `src/assets/` and go through Astro Image. The rest are pre-compressed.

Critical CSS

Single global stylesheet

Tailwind v4 keeps it small; no per-component CSS-in-JS.

Editorial decisions

Content lives in markdown files, not a database — full control, full git history, zero outage surface.
Numbers I cannot pull live (LLM token usage, work metrics) are committed by hand; honesty over fake dashboards.
No comments engine on most pages; Giscus only on long-form posts where conversation actually happens.

Source is open at github.com/PuvaanRaaj. Patches and PRs welcome.