tobyv.me

This site itself.

Why

I’ve wanted a personal site for a while — somewhere to collect notes, share what I’m working on, and have a place on the web that actually reflects who I am rather than what LinkedIn thinks I am.

The digital garden format appealed to me specifically because it removes the freshness pressure of a blog. A garden can have notes in various states of completion, revisited over years. That matches how I actually think about things.

Stack decisions

Astro because it’s content-first, ships zero JS by default, and gets out of the way. I’m not embedded in the React ecosystem for game dev, so the lighter touch suited me.

MDX because I want the occasional interactive component in a note without switching tools.

Pagefind because full-text search over a static site is a solved problem. No backend required.

Tailwind v4 because the new CSS-first config is much cleaner than v3’s JavaScript config files.

The Cmd-K palette is the one place I reached for React — cmdk is the best command palette library out there and it needs React. Everything else is plain Astro components.

The design

Warm terminal aesthetic: dark, JetBrains Mono for chrome, Newsreader for prose. Influenced by Maggie Appleton’s visual work and the general VS Code dark theme genre, but warmer — espresso and sage instead of cold blue-gray.

Design docs are in the wiki if you’re curious about the decisions.