How this site is built.

Framework & tooling

Static site generator	Astro 5
Styling	Tailwind CSS 4 + hand-written CSS tokens
Content format	MDX (frontmatter-validated Markdown with components)
Image pipeline	Sharp via Astro's built-in image service (WebP / AVIF / responsive srcset)
Type checking	TypeScript, strict mode
Package manager	Bun

Hosting

Static hosting	Cloudflare Pages: free tier, global edge, static only (no server functions)
DNS	Cloudflare
TLS	Cloudflare universal SSL (TLS 1.3, HSTS, auto-renewal)
Deploys	Automatic on push to main

Typography

Display & body serif	Literata (SIL Open Font License): editorial, highly legible at reading sizes
UI sans	Inter (SIL Open Font License), with ss01 single-story a + cv11 slashed zero
Mono (code)	JetBrains Mono / IBM Plex Mono / system fallbacks

Analytics & privacy

Analytics	Aptabase: anonymous, aggregate, no cookies, GDPR-friendly by design
Cookies	None set by this site
Third-party scripts	None other than the analytics snippet
Ad networks	None

Full details are in the privacy policy.

Accessibility

• Semantic HTML (proper heading order, landmark regions, aria labels where needed)
• Skip-to-content link on every page
• Focus rings respect focus-visible, visible on keyboard, invisible on mouse
• Reduced-motion media query honored for animations and transitions
• Contrast meets WCAG AA across the dark palette

Performance

• Static HTML, no runtime JS required to read a page
• Images auto-converted to WebP / AVIF with responsive srcset
• CSS inlined for the critical path; larger stylesheets external with long-cache headers
• Prefetch on hover for internal links (not prefetch-all, to stay bandwidth-conscious)
• Font display: swap to avoid invisible text during webfont load

SEO

• Auto-generated sitemap at /sitemap-index.xml
• RSS feed at /guides/rss.xml (with pretty XSL stylesheet for humans)
• Per-page canonical URL, Open Graph, Twitter card
• JSON-LD structured data: Organization, Person, Article, BreadcrumbList, SoftwareApplication
• robots.txt with sitemap autodiscovery

Content

• Guides are MDX, kept in a src/content/guides/ directory under version control
• Frontmatter is validated against a schema at build time; a guide with invalid frontmatter fails the build, not production
• Every guide is written and reviewed by a real person (Akshay C K); nothing is published blind
• Updated dates are tracked and visible on each guide

Credit

Every open-source project this site depends on is listed in package.json and traceable to a public repository with its own license. The craft bar this site aspires to was set by the sites that taught us what honest, calm web design looks like: Panic Inc, Linear, Pitch, and the long tradition of editorial web typography behind them.