Rebuilding this site

The previous version of this site was built in 2023 and it showed. Next 13 with the pages router, styled-components, a typewriter effect in the hero, and a list of the AP classes I took in high school. It was a portfolio for someone applying to internships, and I had stopped being that person a while ago.

The more interesting problem was that it only knew about one third of my life. Nothing on it mentioned running, or travel, or anything you would actually learn about a person from talking to them. So the rebuild was less a redesign than a reframing.

One idea instead of a hobbies section

The obvious move is to bolt a "Hobbies" heading onto the bottom of a résumé. That reads as two websites in a trench coat: the ultras become a fun fact and the engineering stays a job listing.

What actually holds it together is that hundred-mile races and multi-year software projects reward the same narrow thing: staying with something whose payoff is a long way off, and managing yourself well enough to still be functional at the end. Once that is the thesis, the running section is not a digression. It is evidence.

Why the site looks like a map

The visual system is topographic survey: contour lines, elevation profiles, route traces, mile markers. It is doing three jobs at once, which is why it works:

• Contours and grid references are the language of travel.
• Elevation profiles are the language of vert, and every race report opens with one.
• Both are fundamentally instrumentation, the same impulse as a dashboard.

The background of every page is a real contour field, generated with marching squares over a smooth scalar field and drawn to a canvas. It is seeded deterministically, so it renders identically on every load rather than shimmering into something new.

The stack

The rebuild is Next.js 16 on the App Router, TypeScript in strict mode, and Tailwind v4 with a token layer. A few decisions worth recording:

Semantic tokens, not dark: variants. Every colour is a CSS custom property redefined under prefers-color-scheme, then again under [data-theme] so an explicit toggle can override the OS in both directions. Components reference bg-panel and text-ink-2 and are correct in both themes without a single conditional.

Charts are hand-authored SVG. No charting library. The elevation profile is a Catmull-Rom spline converted to cubic beziers, rendered on the server. The draw-in animation uses pathLength="1", which normalises the path so the dash maths needs no JavaScript to measure it.

The map is not a tile service. It projects the world-atlas TopoJSON with d3-geo at build time and emits static paths, so it costs no client JavaScript and picks up the theme tokens like everything else.

Content is data, not components. Races, trips, and timeline entries are typed files; posts are MDX. Adding a race means editing one array. The old site went stale largely because updating it meant editing React.

What is still missing

Photographs, mostly. A design this typographic and this reliant on real imagery is thin without them, and that is the next thing to fix.