On Building a Personal Website

The personal website is an endangered species. Social media platforms have absorbed most of the energy that once went into maintaining a corner of the internet. But there is something valuable about having a space that is truly yours—a place designed for reading and thinking.

Why Build From Scratch?

The tooling available today makes it possible to build something genuinely good without a large team. Next.js handles rendering and routing. Sanity provides a flexible content management system. Vercel deploys it all with zero configuration. The result is a site that loads fast, looks clean, and is easy to update.

Design Principles

Serif typography for comfortable reading. Sidenotes in the margin instead of footnotes at the bottom. A table of contents for longer pieces. Link previews on hover so you can decide whether to click. Dark mode that remembers your preference. These are small things individually, but together they create an experience that respects the reader's time and attention.

Typography Matters

Source Serif 4 was chosen for its excellent readability at body text sizes. JetBrains Mono handles code blocks with ligatures and clear character differentiation.