Rebuilding this website from scratch

The first version of this site did its job: it existed. It had a blog, a kbar palette, and a GitHub stats card. It also had no sitemap, no OG images, a 484 KB PNG as a card background, and a body font that was whatever your browser felt like that day. Time for a rewrite.

What v2 is

This site is a Next.js 16 app with React Server Components doing almost all the work. Client JavaScript is reserved for the things that are actually interactive:

• the terminal on the homepage (help, whoami, neofetch — go poke it)
• the ⌘K command palette, plus vim keys — j/k scroll, gg/G jump
• the statusline footer — mode, current file, and your scroll position as a line percentage, exactly like the editor I live in
• the social layer: guestbook, comments, and emoji reactions, signed in via GitHub or Google SSO (Auth.js v5, JWT sessions, Drizzle + Postgres)

Everything else — blog rendering, project data, the GitHub contribution heatmap — is server-rendered HTML with ISR, which is why the pages load the way they do.

Decisions I'd defend in a code review

Opacity over color. The dark theme is one near-black background with text at three opacity tiers and a single green accent. If everything is colorful, nothing is.

MDX on the filesystem. No CMS. Posts are .mdx files with zod-validated frontmatter, highlighted by shiki at build time. A blog that requires a database to render text is a blog that will eventually not render text.

Feature flags via environment. The guestbook, comments, reactions, view counters, and the AI assistant all switch off gracefully when their env vars are missing. The site never breaks because a database is napping.

Live data, cached hard. Stars, forks, and crates.io downloads are real and revalidate hourly. Broken widgets are worse than no widgets, so everything degrades to "hidden" rather than "spinner forever".

The stack, for the curious

Next.js 16 · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS 4 · motion · next-mdx-remote + shiki · Auth.js v5 · Drizzle ORM + Neon Postgres · Vercel AI SDK · deployed on Vercel. Source is linked in the footer — it's open, like everything else I build.

If you find a bug, the guestbook doubles as an issue tracker with worse SLAs.