This site is the pitch

The instinct to hand someone a CV is basically an instinct to summarize yourself in a format built for skimming — degrees, job titles, a bullet list of skills a hiring manager scans in six seconds. That format rewards claims. “Comfortable with modern web technology” is a claim. A self-hosted site, built on infrastructure you understand well enough to run it off your own hardware, is evidence. One of those a stranger has to take on faith. The other one they’re already looking at.

So the actual design goal for this site was to make the medium argue the case before a single essay does. It’s built on Astro rather than something heavier, because almost everything here is content — essays, project notes — and shipping a full application framework’s worth of JavaScript to render text nobody asked to be interactive would be exactly the kind of unexamined default I write about avoiding elsewhere on this site. It’s self-hosted rather than dropped onto a platform, because owning the full path from a Markdown file to a page in someone’s browser is a small, contained example of the same principle behind the Sweden/Spain essay here: understand the primitive well enough to build on it directly, instead of accepting whatever a platform decided your ceiling should be.

None of that is a subtle argument, and it isn’t supposed to be. If a page loads fast, degrades gracefully, and was clearly put together by someone who understood every layer rather than assembling one from a template, that tells a visitor something a bullet point never could. The essays make the case for how I think. The site itself, quietly, is making the case for how I build.