How this site is built

A site for technologists should have its hood easy to pop. Here’s everything under ours.

The stack

• SvelteKit with adapter-static — every page is prerendered to plain HTML at build time. No servers, no cold starts, nothing to patch at 2am.
• Tailwind CSS with a custom palette (river, sunset, pine) and the typography plugin for post bodies.
• mdsvex to turn markdown files into Svelte components, frontmatter and syntax highlighting included.
• Self-hosted fonts via Fontsource — Fraunces for display type, Inter for everything else. No third-party font CDN in the request waterfall.

Static all the way down

Builds land in an S3 bucket fronted by CloudFront, all managed with Terraform. A small CloudFront function rewrites clean URLs to the index.html files that the static build produces, which is why every path on this site ends with a tidy trailing slash.

Deploys are a GitHub Actions workflow: push to main, the site builds, and aws s3 sync ships it. That’s the whole pipeline.

The blog pipeline

Posts are markdown files in src/posts/. At build time a glob import gathers them up, reads their frontmatter, estimates reading time, and sorts them by date:

const modules = import.meta.glob('/src/posts/*.md', { eager: true });

export const posts = Object.entries(modules)
	.map(([path, mod]) => ({
		slug: path.split('/').pop().replace('.md', ''),
		...mod.metadata
	}))
	.filter((post) => post.published !== false)
	.sort((a, b) => (a.date < b.date ? 1 : -1));

The blog index, the post pages, the RSS feed, and the sitemap are all generated from that one list. Adding a post means adding a file — nothing else to update.

Comments without a backend

A static site can’t store comments, so we lean on GitHub: giscus maps each post to a GitHub Discussion and renders the thread in an embedded widget. Free, open source, no ads, no tracking — and moderation happens with normal GitHub tools.

Poke around

The whole thing is in the repo. PRs welcome — that includes blog posts, which get reviewed like any other code.