darrenneese.com

Personal website of Darren Neese. A calm, fast, privacy-first personal site with a glassmorphic design system and (from Phase 5) a signature interactive knowledge graph.

Stack

• Astro static site (multi-page, minimal JavaScript)
• Tailwind CSS v4 via the @tailwindcss/vite plugin
• TypeScript (strict)
• Bun as the runtime and package manager
• Biome for lint and format
• Self-hosted fonts (Space Grotesk, IBM Plex Sans, Cascadia Code) via @fontsource. No Google Fonts, no CDNs, no third-party scripts, no analytics.

Develop

bun install
bun run dev       # local dev server
bun run build     # production build to dist/
bun run preview   # preview the built site
bun run check     # astro check (type checking)
bun run lint      # biome lint + format check
bun run format    # biome format --write

Design

The finished design lives in design/ (design-canvas exports and a screenshot gallery, drawn under the placeholder name "Alex Mercer" and rebranded here as Darren Neese). The design system tokens in src/styles/global.css are ported directly from those mockups.

Deploy

Pushing to main triggers Forgejo Actions, which SSHes to the deploy server and runs Docker Compose behind Caddy. The multi-stage Dockerfile builds the Astro site with Bun (stage 1) and serves the static dist/ with nginx (stage 2). compose.yml joins the external proxy network and exposes port 80.

Local commits do not deploy; only a push to main does.

The prior React app ("The Architect") and the original mockups are preserved on the archive/the-architect branch.