Uses
What this site is made of.
Call it a colophon. A look at how the page in front of you is built and what it links out to, plus a note on the machine I wrote it on. No affiliate links, and no gear I don’t actually use.
This site
The interface here is bespoke. No component library underneath it, just headless primitives and my own styles over a small set of design tokens. One of the projects further down, Forge, is a component library of mine, so it’d be fair to assume this site runs on it. It doesn’t. Forge talks in a calm, corporate register that’s right for a dashboard and wrong for a page like this, so the site has its own hand-built UI instead.
- Framework
- Astro 7, static-first. Every page is HTML at build time; the only JavaScript that ships is the handful of islands that genuinely need it.
- Styling
- Tailwind 4 over a custom token layer. Two themes, both hand-tuned in oklch rather than one flipped into the other.
- Components
- Radix headless primitives, wired up with my own styles through class-variance-authority. No component kit under the hood.
- The hero
- A GLSL aurora shader on three.js and React Three Fiber, hand-written and loaded only on the home page.
- Motion
- GSAP for the scroll choreography, Framer Motion for the interface. All of it folds away under reduced-motion.
- Command menu
- cmdk, behind ⌘K, so the whole site is reachable from the keyboard.
- Type
- Bricolage Grotesque, a single variable grotesque doing both the display sizes and the body text; on Cyrillic, Golos Text picks it up.
- Language
- TypeScript in strict mode, type-checked with astro check on every build.
- Hosting
- Vercel.
The projects
A few of the names above, plus a couple that aren’t, are things I’ve built. Two are finished, three are still in progress, and every one of them is open source.
Aurora
BuiltA browser playground for writing GLSL in real time
Pulse
BuiltFounder metrics from several services on one screen
Forge
BuiltA headless component library for data-dense dashboards
Canvas
In progressA collaborative editor that keeps a diagram and its code in sync
Strider
In progressA private voice notes app that transcribes on your phone
Day to day
Most of the code gets written in VS Code, with WebStorm coming out for the heavier refactors. The machine is a desktop I built myself: a Ryzen 5 5600, a Radeon RX 6750 XT, 16 GB of memory, on Windows. Nothing high-end, and that’s on purpose. It’s a fair stand-in for whatever a visitor is running, so if the site feels quick here it should feel quick there too.
- TypeScript
- React
- React Native
- Redux Toolkit
- React Router
- React Hook Form
- Vite
- Tailwind
- SCSS
- Micro-frontends
- Design systems
- JSON Schema
- WebSocket
- WebRTC
- HLS
- Figma
- Motion
- Accessibility