Overview
The site you're on now — a rebuild of my personal site as a fast, fully static
playground. The old Gatsby version is preserved at /archive for fun;
everything else is new.
Highlights
- Generative landing — the nav (
blog · project · about) is laid out by a seeded solver that packs each word as a monotone staircase into a responsive grid, then a DFS "snake" draws the words in with a connecting trail. It's a different layout every refresh. - The Lab — a small system of efficient canvas animations (orbits, flow field, starfield, cyclic automaton, ripple grid), each with live, URL-shareable knobs and a writeup. A tiny one rides along on the home page.
- Paint-reveal portrait — the About hero shows a line drawing by default and paints the real photo in as you move the cursor.
- Light & dark — full theming via a shadcn token system +
next-themes.
How it's built
Next.js (App Router, React 19) exported as fully static HTML/CSS/JS — no server, no runtime cost. Content (blog posts, projects, the about timeline) is MDX validated against Protobuf-defined data models, with code highlighting via Shiki. The animations are hand-rolled Canvas 2D on a shared harness that pauses off-screen and respects reduced motion — no animation library.
It deploys to AWS (private S3 origin + CloudFront with OAC) provisioned entirely with Terraform, fronted by DNSimple. The whole thing — source, infra, and the generative bits — is on GitHub.