First post

Most of the site is finished work. The writing surface is the part that isn’t — by design.

These pages collect the half-formed thoughts that don’t fit anywhere else: notes-in-progress on apps I’m building, vulnerabilities I’m reading about, the occasional film essay when something hits hard enough to write about. The voice is closer to a notebook than a journal.

How it gets here

The pipeline is deliberately small. Each essay is an .mdx file, validated by Zod against a shared schema in src/content/config.ts. Authoring looks like this:

const essays = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: "**/*.{md,mdx}", base: "./src/content/essays" }),
  schema: baseFrontmatter.extend({
    heroImage: z.string().min(1).optional(),
    heroImageAlt: z.string().min(1).optional(),
    ogImageOverride: z.string().min(1).optional(),
  }),
});

The same MDX renders here, in the RSS feed, and (eventually) on the throwback surface — three views of the same single source. Code blocks pick up syntax highlighting at build time; outbound links carry the right rel attributes automatically; per-post Open Graph cards get rendered to PNG at build and served as static assets.

What I’m holding myself to

Three small rules:

• One topic per post. If I find myself writing two posts in one, I split.
• No dates in titles. The frontmatter has the date; saying it twice is fluff.
• Outbound links earn their place. If a link doesn’t add something the prose can’t, it doesn’t go in.

That’s it. The rest of the surface — typography, rhythm, the voice — is doing the real work.