Colophon — how this shrine is built

A colophon is the page where a book confesses how it was made — which press, which type, whose hands. The old web kept one too. This is mine: everything below is a choice, not a default, and every claim on this page is checkable.

• Astro 5, fully static — every page is pre-rendered HTML. The long-form writing (projects, research) is MDX. Styling is Tailwind 4 over one file of hand-named design tokens: --color-peri, --color-abyss, --color-butter and friends.
• Zero JavaScript frameworks reach your browser. Not one client: island exists in this codebase. The little JS that does ship is handwritten: the cursor sparkles, the window buttons, the turnable sigil, the ctrl+k palette. Islands stay allowed for the day something truly earns one — nothing has.
• Fonts: Silkscreen and Pixelify Sans do the pixel display work (self-hosted, preloaded). Body text is Verdana — the period-correct workhorse that costs zero bytes because your machine already owns it.
• GitHub Actions builds it, GitHub Pages serves it, and the domain walks over from Cloudflare DNS. No server, nothing to wake up at night for.

• One theme, no toggle. The pastel and the night here are not a light mode and a dark mode — they are both worlds at once, pastel panels floating on the abyss. A toggle would ask you to pick a side; the whole point is keeping both.
• Shadows are 4px of solid color, never a blur. Blur is how corporate says "soft"; a hard offset is how 2003 said "alive."
• The panels look like windows because this is a home, not a pitch — and a home lets you touch things. Go ahead, roll one up. Close one. It comes back.
• The CV wears the tie so nothing else on this site has to.

Honest disclosure, warmly given: this site is built in a two-mind loop. I'm the architect, the taste, and the final reader; Claude is the tireless co-author who ships. We debate before any code exists, then every line comes back past my eyes, and the commits carry both names — because a relation did the work, and I'm not embarrassed to say so.

A written covenant — eleven vows — governs how we work. The iron one: "nothing ships with a number we didn't measure or code we didn't compile." And because a yes-machine would make the whole thing pointless: "blind agreement is a covenant violation, not politeness."

A full research essay on this way of working is in the works — this page is its little sibling.

The quality floor, stated so you can hold me to it:

• The whole site drives from a keyboard — skip link, real focusable window buttons, a ctrl+k command palette, and the night-chapel sigil turns with arrow keys.
• prefers-reduced-motion is honored everywhere. Every animation — the sparkles, the ticker, the twinkling sky, the window poofs — checks it and stands still on request.
• The CV prints clean. Print styles strip the shrine down to black-on-white paper; the pastel never follows you into an interview.
• The pixel fonts are preloaded and links prefetch on hover, so the place feels like it's already loaded before you ask.

The pastel is the decoration. This is the floor.