How this site was built.

stack

framework

Astro 6 · static + Preact islands

preact

~3KB runtime (only the swarm + constellation islands need it)

styles

Tailwind 4 (CSS-first) + scoped Astro <style> blocks

content

MDX with typed Zod schemas + glob loaders

hosting

Vercel, auto-deploy on push to main

analytics

GA4 + Vercel Web Analytics + Speed Insights

repo

github.com/alectivism/personal-website

typography

palette

design_decisions

• Dark by default. The site identity is dark. Light theme is a respected option, not the marketing version.
• Crosshair cursor site-wide. Signal: this is a builder's tool, not a brochure.
• $ prompts everywhere. Every primary CTA reads as a shell command. Builder-tone all the way through.
• Section labels with underscores. // agents_at_work instead of "Agents at work" — looks like a filename.
• One canvas island. AgentSwarm is the only Preact island on the homepage. Everything else is server-rendered HTML+CSS for speed.
• No JS framework lock-in. Astro lets me use Preact where it earns its weight and ship raw HTML where it doesn't.
• Accessibility intent. Skip link, focus-visible rings, ARIA on canvases, prefers-reduced-motion respected, semantic HTML throughout.
• Theme-aware everything. Even the canvas-rendered swarm + constellation read CSS vars and re-render on theme change.