Trevor Fernando — Writing

First post

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Placeholder essay one

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is a placeholder essay shipped alongside the writing surface in 006. It exists so the home-page “Recent writing” section, the writing index, and the RSS feed all flex against more than one entry from day one. Replace the body with real material before public launch.

The pipeline below is the authoring shape:

# Add an essay
echo "---\ntitle: ...\nslug: ...\n..." > src/content/essays/<slug>.mdx
pnpm build

For more on the schema, see the Astro Content Collections docs.

Placeholder essay two

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Second placeholder essay. Same shape as the first — a paragraph, a code block, and an outbound link — so the index sort and the home-page “Recent writing” section both have something to flex against.

A second snippet, in a different language to confirm Shiki picks the right grammar at build time:

# Plain placeholder snippet
def hello(name: str) -> str:
    return f"Hello, {name}"

For background on the broader portfolio approach, see the constitution.