This is the first post on the new brettsmith.nz. Since the site exists partly to show how I think about building things, a colophon seems like the right place to start.
The stack, on purpose
The site is a static build. Eleventy turns a folder of templates and Markdown into plain HTML, and GitHub Pages serves it. There is no database, no server to keep alive, and nothing to patch at 2am. Every project page and every post is a file in a repository, reviewed the same way as any other change.
That boredom is the point. A personal site should outlive whatever framework was fashionable the year it was made, and the cheapest thing to operate is the thing that isn't running.
Design first
The look came out of a design exploration before any of it was code: an editorial, Swiss-influenced layout with a single deep-green accent, a monospace motif for structure, and a light/dark theme that respects your system setting until you tell it otherwise. Translating that into a small, dependency-free stylesheet was most of the work.
More soon — including proper write-ups of the projects listed on the home page.