Technical

The Next.js 16 app router powers this website, which is hosted on Vercel. React Server Components are exclusively used to keep the DX the way I like it: big blocks of plain ole HTML that point to well-architected CSS.

Speaking of style, I'm always deploying the latest version of Tailwind CSS, with a custom file of preset classes, to avoid the dreaded className soup. Check out my globals.css on GitHub to see how I keep things tidy.

I must admit: the idea of using React and Tailwind for a personal project made me vomit as recent as a few months ago. My formative years coincided with the golden age of web standards. HTML is my second language, and I've built Tailwind-esque libraries of my own at least a few times. These tools work against the grain of my experience, and although they're meant to speed up development, I have historically found them to slow me down.

I recently gave Next.js a go, and find it to be the perfect application of React. They've abstracted away all of the boilerplate Javascript so that markup is the star. That's why I loved Vue for all of these years. So the JS industrial complex got me.

Vercel is wonderful: I am using their native analytics package, and rely on deployment alerts and observability to monitor my site's status.

Typography

Max Miedinger's Neue Haas Grotesk (Display & Text) served by Adobe Fonts. This typeface has exceptional kerning, so I don't have to muck around with letter spacing. It also gives me the Swiss modernist Massimo Vignelli vibe that I'm going for.

The dark mode implementation adjusts font weights—medium instead of regular for body text, bold instead of semibold for headings. Light text on dark backgrounds renders thinner than the inverse, and bumping the weight compensates. Small detail, but it matters.

Et cetera

I built this site by hand in Cursor, delegating small refactoring tasks to a coding agent. More and more, I'm finding that I have to be stroking the keys in order to be productive. Otherwise, it's too easy to prompt your way off a cliff.

That said, AI has fundamentally changed how I work. I wrote about this in my piece on the surgical team model—one person holding the entire system in their head, with AI collapsing both the mechanical work and the knowledge barriers. For a portfolio site, that's overkill. But the muscle memory matters.

No templates, no themes, no drag-and-drop builders. Every line of markup is intentional. Vignelli's influence shows up here too: constraints breed clarity. A limited palette, a single typeface family, generous whitespace, and trust that strong hierarchy does the heavy lifting.