Colophon

In July 2026 I decided this site looked generic and set out to fix it. I sampled eleven of the best personal engineering sites I could find — Paul Graham, Dan Abramov, Julia Evans, Simon Willison, Bartosz Ciechanowski, and friends — looking for what to steal. What they have in common: a white page, dark ink, one blue, a serif for reading, and almost nothing else. The average of the best sites on the internet is a plain page.

So that's the design: the statistical mean of the genre, adopted on purpose. In this genre, plain is what credibility looks like. Anything distinctive here should be something I built, not something I decorated.

The machinery

The plainness is load-bearing. Underneath it:

fig. 1.2.1 — the figure system, drawn by itself.

fig. 1.2.2 — the ledger, counted by area.

source: src/app/figures/registry.ts

fig. 1.2.3 — the build, weighed route by route.

source: .next/app-build-manifest.json · scripts/build-fig-weight.mjs

⌘KA command palette. It searches every page, project, and code bit on the site.
?The keyboard cheat sheet. g then a letter jumps between pages, like it should.
xX-ray mode. It outlines the architecture of whatever page you’re on and tells you how it was rendered.
>A working terminal at /cli, with a virtual filesystem generated from the same registries that render these pages. Pipes work. wren "what should I read?" also works.
wrenThe small bird at /desk (and the quiet orb in the corner of most pages). It can search the project catalog, open pages, and draft an introduction email. It is instructed not to oversell me, with mixed results.
▲The Ziggurat, a first-person pixel-art world at /studio, software-rendered in one dependency-free HTML file. It has no business being on a professional site, which is why it's here.
404The error page is worth mistyping a URL for.

The stack

Next.js on Vercel, statically rendered almost everywhere. Type is Source Serif 4 for prose, Geist Sans for interface, Geist Mono for code. No analytics, no cookies, no tracking of any kind — I genuinely don't know you were here. The mailing list is double-opt-in and one-click out.

There are at least three things this page isn't telling you.