I'm building this in public
Why I'm putting the portfolio, the writing, and the workflows out in the open — and a quick tour of how this site actually works.
I've spent most of my career building things behind NDAs and private repos. This site is the opposite of that: a place to think out loud about engineering, leadership, and the workflows that actually move work.
Most "personal sites" are a résumé with extra steps. I want this one to be a workbench — where the things I'm figuring out are visible while I'm figuring them out.
Why build in public
Working in the open forces a kind of honesty. If I'm going to claim a workflow is good, I should be able to show it running. If a decision was hard, the tradeoffs should be legible, not laundered into a tidy story after the fact.
There's also a compounding effect: the notes I write for myself turn out to be the notes other people needed. So I'm going to keep writing them here, and cross-posting the useful ones.
Taste is a feature. The constraints you choose say as much as the code you ship.
How this site works
The whole site is one source of truth. The theme — every color, font, and radius you're looking at — is a single set of tokens called Raw Concrete, chosen from ten I generated and stress-tested:
// the canonical theme, baked into :root — no runtime switching on the live site
export const DEFAULT_THEME_ID = "raw-concrete";A few things are wired up already, with more landing soon:
- A live token-usage dashboard — how much compute it takes to make cool things, as a heatmap and trend lines.
- This writing section, authored in plain MDX and published by pushing to
main. - Interactive, explorable posts — diagrams and visuals that do more than a static image can.
What's next
The next thing I'm building is the part you can't see yet: a pipeline that lets a post's interactive visuals export themselves as GIFs, so the same idea reads well here and in a tweet. When that's done, building in public gets a lot cheaper.
More soon.