Hello, world

I've spent most of my career building and designing backend systems for banks, mostly for regulatory reporting. That work tends to stay behind the firewall, so this site is a place to write about the parts that can be shared: architecture, trade-offs, and lessons from making numbers add up.

How this site is built

A personal site is a small system, but it's still a system, so here's the architecture in brief:

Next.js 16 with the App Router and React Server Components. Every page is prerendered at build time.
MDX for posts. Each post is a file in the repo that exports its own metadata, and the build fails if that metadata is wrong.
Tailwind CSS v4 for styling, with light and dark themes set before first paint.
Vercel for hosting. A push to main deploys and every pull request gets a preview.

The metadata check is the same idea I'd use at work: validate at the boundary and fail loudly.

src/lib/posts.ts

function assertMetadata(slug: string, value: unknown): asserts value is PostMetadata {
  // ...
  if (problems.length) {
    throw new Error(`Invalid metadata in blog post "${slug}": ${problems.join(", ")}`);
  }
}

There's very little client-side JavaScript. Press Ctrl/⌘ + K to see most of it.