how it's built

the idea

i build frontends for iot devices for a living, so this site is drawn as a circuit board. the dark theme is the board itself: green soldermask, white labels, gold copper. the light theme is the same board as its assembly drawing, on paper.

every element on the home page is a part with a job. the name block is U1, projects are P1, P2 and so on, notes are test points along a rail, and the footer is the drawing's title block. numbers follow the order things were added, oldest first, like parts placed on a real board, so they never change.

nothing casts a shadow, corners are square, and copper is the only colour.

colours

every colour comes in a pair, one for each theme, doing the same job in both.

type

three typefaces, each with one job.

• notes, projects, and a working diary

  b612: headings and labels. it was designed for aircraft cockpit displays.

• U1 P7 TP12 2026-09-28

  b612 mono: part numbers, dates and counts, with every digit the same width.

• publishing is one file. drop it in a folder, commit, and it is live.

  atkinson hyperlegible next: everything you read at length. it keeps similar letters, like l, 1 and i, from passing for each other.

what it runs on

• astro, which turns everything into plain html at build time. there is no client framework, only three small scripts: the theme toggle, the copper traces, and the cv download.
• markdown files, one per entry: 31 notes and 8 projects today. publishing is adding a file and committing it.
• one hand-written stylesheet, 1,151 lines.
• self-hosted fonts, no analytics, no third-party requests.
• static hosting on cloudflare pages.

the design was worked out with impeccable, a design skill for coding agents. the long version is in designing this site as a circuit board.