Hello, world

Every site starts with one of these. Mine is no exception.

The plan for this place is simple: write things down, publish them, and keep the whole stack small enough that I can still understand it in a year. That last constraint rules out a surprising amount of modern web tooling.

why plain HTML

I have built enough sites to know that the interesting part is never the build pipeline. A static site generator is a fine tool, but it comes with a dependency tree, a config file, and an upgrade path that eventually breaks. For a site that is mostly words, that is a lot of machinery to hold in my head.

So this site is hand-written HTML, a single stylesheet, and a CNAME file. That is the entire stack:

index.html
blog/index.html
blog/hello-world.html
apps/index.html
about/index.html
css/style.css
CNAME

Adding a post means copying a file and editing it. There is no npm install, no lockfile to re-resolve, and nothing to rebuild. As a bonus, the whole thing works with JavaScript disabled, because there is no JavaScript.

what goes here

• Notes on whatever I am building at the moment.
• Write-ups of problems that took me longer than they should have.
• Occasional opinions about tooling.

The best documentation is the kind that still makes sense after you have forgotten why you wrote it.

More soon.