.forgejo/workflows/deploy.yml

@@ -3,10 +3,8 @@ name: Deploy to Pages
 on:
   push:
     branches: ['main']
-  
   pull_request:
     branches: ['main']
-  
   workflow_dispatch:
 
 concurrency:
@@ -31,26 +29,21 @@ jobs:
 
       - name: Lint
         run: |
-          set -eo pipefail
           npm run lint
-          npm run typecheck
-          npm run qa:no-em-dashes
-          npm run qa:spelling
-          npm run qa:no-github-links
+          git diff
+          if [[ `git status --porcelain` ]]; then
+            exit 1
+          fi
 
-      - name: Build
-        run: npm run build
+      - name: Typecheck
+        run: npm run typecheck
 
-      - name: QA build
+      - name: Build, Astro Audit & QA
         run: |
-          set -eo pipefail
-          npm run qa:astro-audit
-          npm run qa:links
-          npm run qa:no-js
-          npm run qa:overflow
-          npm run qa:preview-cropping
+          npx playwright install chromium
+          npm run qa
 
-      - name: On main, Copy build to host pages mount
+      - name: Copy build to host pages mount
         if: github.event_name == 'push' && github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
         uses: http://forgejo:3000/andras/ci-actions/deploy-pages@main
         with:

.vscode/settings.json

@@ -1,9 +1,42 @@
 {
+  "cSpell.words": [
+    "andras",
+    "Andras",
+    "astra",
+    "colour",
+    "colours",
+    "datetime",
+    "decla",
+    "EEPROM",
+    "favicons",
+    "favourite",
+    "forex",
+    "froms",
+    "Glsl",
+    "leds",
+    "linkedin",
+    "mesmerising",
+    "microcontrollers",
+    "mixins",
+    "noopener",
+    "optimisations",
+    "optimised",
+    "organiser",
+    "playsinline",
+    "realised",
+    "schmelczer",
+    "serialisation",
+    "synchronised",
+    "tabindex",
+    "utilised",
+    "utilising",
+    "webm",
+    "webp",
+    "youtube"
+  ],
   "files.exclude": {
     "node_modules": true
   },
-  "editor.rulers": [
-    90
-  ],
+  "editor.rulers": [90],
   "editor.wordWrap": "on"
-}
+}

README.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 Engineering writeups by Andras Schmelczer: finished projects with the design constraints left in. Built with Astro, no required client JavaScript.
 
-All content lives in the single `src/content/work` collection: each entry can carry an `article` facet (a page under `/articles/`), a `project` facet (a card on `/projects/`), or both. Normal pages are rendered as static HTML.
+Articles live in `src/content/posts`, project index entries in `src/content/projects`, and normal pages are rendered as static HTML.
 
 ## Setup
 
@@ -11,8 +11,6 @@ npm ci
 npx playwright install --with-deps chromium # required before Playwright QA checks
 ```
 
-The `overrides.yaml` entry in `package.json` forces every transitive `yaml` dependency to 2.9+, ahead of what some Astro tooling requests on its own. Drop it once `npm ls yaml` shows nothing older without it.
-
 ## Commands
 
 ```sh
@@ -25,11 +23,11 @@ npm run qa
 
 ## Structure
 
-- `src/content/work`: Markdown entries (article and/or project facets)
+- `src/content/posts`: Markdown articles
+- `src/content/projects`: project index entries
 - `src/pages`: static routes
 - `src/layouts`: page and post layouts
 - `src/components`: reusable UI pieces
 - `src/styles/global.css`: the visual system
-- `scripts`: QA checks run by `npm run qa` (shared helpers in `scripts/lib`)
 - `public/media/downloads`: CV and thesis PDFs
 - `public/media/video`: project videos

astro.config.mjs

@@ -7,15 +7,14 @@ import rehypeAutolinkHeadings from 'rehype-autolink-headings';
 import rehypeSlug from 'rehype-slug';
 import { visit } from 'unist-util-visit';
 
-// Build a lookup of article slugs to their last modification dates so the
-// sitemap can advertise accurate <lastmod> values to crawlers. astro:content
-// isn't available inside the config, so we read entry frontmatter directly.
-// Each entry uses a single-line top-level scalar `date:` key, so a small regex
-// extraction is sufficient and intentional. (`updated:` now lives nested under
-// `article:`; no entry sets it, so falling back to `date` is correct.)
+// Build a lookup of post slugs to their last modification dates so the sitemap
+// can advertise accurate <lastmod> values to crawlers. astro:content isn't
+// available inside the config, so we read post frontmatter directly. Our posts
+// always use single-line scalar `date:` / `updated:` keys, so a small regex
+// extraction is sufficient and intentional.
 const postsDir = path.resolve(
   path.dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)),
-  'src/content/work'
+  'src/content/posts'
 );
 
 function extractScalar(frontmatter, key) {

cspell.json

@@ -1,116 +0,0 @@
-{
-  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/streetsidesoftware/cspell/main/cspell.schema.json",
-  "version": "0.2",
-  "language": "en,en-GB",
-  "ignorePaths": [
-    "node_modules/**",
-    "dist/**",
-    ".astro/**",
-    "package-lock.json",
-    "*.svg",
-    "public/**",
-    "todo.md"
-  ],
-  "words": [
-    "acked",
-    "acks",
-    "adblocker",
-    "apos",
-    "backpressure",
-    "backtest",
-    "bgsave",
-    "binaryen",
-    "bindgen",
-    "bitpacking",
-    "blockedbyclient",
-    "borgmann",
-    "btrfs",
-    "cheatable",
-    "collab",
-    "conveyal",
-    "crewmates",
-    "datasheet",
-    "datasheets",
-    "decla",
-    "dequant",
-    "desync",
-    "domcontentloaded",
-    "emelt",
-    "érettségi",
-    "extensionless",
-    "extrapolators",
-    "fizika",
-    "forex",
-    "fouc",
-    "funimation",
-    "gameboy",
-    "glsl",
-    "greatai",
-    "hanning",
-    "healthcheck",
-    "immich",
-    "immich's",
-    "importmap",
-    "incrementality",
-    "janky",
-    "jemalloc",
-    "keepalives",
-    "laion",
-    "loggable",
-    "malloc",
-    "metas",
-    "mispredictions",
-    "mixolydian",
-    "mlockall",
-    "mosfets",
-    "nixplay's",
-    "ntfy",
-    "numba",
-    "numpy",
-    "nums",
-    "permacomputing",
-    "physarum",
-    "piskel",
-    "pocketbase",
-    "powerups",
-    "proptest",
-    "refetches",
-    "reflashing",
-    "reimplementable",
-    "requantised",
-    "rgba",
-    "scalex",
-    "scaley",
-    "schmelczer",
-    "scrollables",
-    "serde",
-    "setpoints",
-    "shiki",
-    "slugifies",
-    "speculationrules",
-    "sqlx",
-    "stdlib",
-    "stft",
-    "strobing",
-    "stucki",
-    "subvolume",
-    "syncer",
-    "szintű",
-    "tamagotchi",
-    "tamagotchis",
-    "tarjan's",
-    "tidepool",
-    "tmpfs",
-    "tweakpane",
-    "unsets",
-    "vaultlink",
-    "vtable",
-    "waveshare",
-    "waveshare's",
-    "webform",
-    "webgpu",
-    "wgsl",
-    "writeups",
-    "zstd"
-  ]
-}

package.json

@@ -10,24 +10,22 @@
   "scripts": {
     "dev": "astro dev --host 0.0.0.0 --port 5173",
     "typecheck": "astro check",
-    "lint": "prettier --check \"astro.config.mjs\" \"src/**/*.{astro,ts,md,css}\" \"scripts/**/*.mjs\" \"*.md\" \"*.json\"",
-    "format": "prettier --write \"astro.config.mjs\" \"src/**/*.{astro,ts,md,css}\" \"scripts/**/*.mjs\" \"*.md\" \"*.json\"",
+    "lint": "prettier --check \"astro.config.mjs\" \"src/**/*.{astro,ts,md,css}\" \"scripts/*.mjs\" \"*.md\" \"*.json\"",
+    "format": "prettier --write \"astro.config.mjs\" \"src/**/*.{astro,ts,md,css}\" \"scripts/*.mjs\" \"*.md\" \"*.json\"",
     "build": "astro build",
     "preview": "astro preview",
     "audit:astro": "npm run build && node scripts/install-playwright-deps.mjs && node scripts/export-astro-audit.mjs",
     "qa:astro-audit": "node scripts/install-playwright-deps.mjs && node scripts/export-astro-audit.mjs --fail-on-issues",
     "qa:no-em-dashes": "node scripts/check-no-em-dashes.mjs",
-    "qa:spelling": "cspell --no-progress \"astro.config.mjs\" \"src/**/*.{astro,ts,md,css}\" \"scripts/**/*.mjs\" \"*.md\"",
-    "qa:no-github-links": "node scripts/check-no-github-links.mjs",
     "qa:links": "node scripts/check-links.mjs",
     "qa:no-js": "node scripts/check-no-js.mjs",
     "qa:overflow": "node scripts/install-playwright-deps.mjs && node scripts/check-overflow.mjs",
     "qa:preview-cropping": "node scripts/install-playwright-deps.mjs && node scripts/check-preview-cropping.mjs",
-    "qa": "npm run typecheck && npm run lint && npm run qa:no-em-dashes && npm run qa:spelling && npm run qa:no-github-links && npm run build && npm run qa:astro-audit && npm run qa:links && npm run qa:no-js && npm run qa:overflow && npm run qa:preview-cropping"
+    "qa": "npm run typecheck && npm run lint && npm run qa:no-em-dashes && npm run build && npm run qa:astro-audit && npm run qa:links && npm run qa:no-js && npm run qa:overflow && npm run qa:preview-cropping"
   },
   "repository": {
     "type": "git",
-    "url": "git+https://git.schmelczer.dev/andras/schmelczer.dev.git"
+    "url": "git+https://github.com/schmelczer/schmelczer.github.io.git"
   },
   "keywords": [
     "blog",
@@ -38,29 +36,27 @@
   "author": "Andras Schmelczer",
   "license": "GPL-3.0-or-later",
   "bugs": {
-    "url": "https://git.schmelczer.dev/andras/schmelczer.dev/issues"
+    "url": "https://github.com/schmelczer/schmelczer.github.io/issues"
   },
-  "homepage": "https://git.schmelczer.dev/andras/schmelczer.dev#readme",
+  "homepage": "https://github.com/schmelczer/schmelczer.github.io#readme",
   "devDependencies": {
     "@astrojs/check": "^0.9.9",
     "@astrojs/rss": "^4.0.18",
     "@astrojs/sitemap": "^3.7.2",
-    "@types/node": "^22.13.0",
     "astro": "^6.3.1",
-    "cspell": "^10.0.1",
     "playwright": "^1.59.1",
     "prettier": "^3.8.3",
     "prettier-plugin-astro": "^0.14.1",
     "rehype-autolink-headings": "^7.1.0",
     "rehype-slug": "^6.0.0",
     "typescript": "^5.9.3",
-    "unist-util-visit": "^5.1.0"
+    "unist-util-visit": "^5.1.0",
+    "sharp": "^0.34.5"
   },
   "overrides": {
     "yaml": "^2.9.0"
   },
   "dependencies": {
-    "@plausible-analytics/tracker": "^0.4.5",
-    "sharp": "^0.34.5"
+    "@plausible-analytics/tracker": "^0.4.5"
   }
 }

public/media/video/ad_astra.vtt

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+WEBVTT
+
+00:00.000 --> 00:04.000
+No spoken dialogue. Game audio only.
+
+00:04.000 --> 00:35.000
+The Ad Astra handheld board runs the game on a small OLED display.
+
+00:35.000 --> 01:05.000
+The player controls the game through the IR input while the engine updates the display in real time.
+
+01:05.000 --> 01:34.600
+The clip continues showing gameplay on the custom ATtiny85-based board.

scripts/check-links.mjs

@@ -1,17 +1,59 @@
-import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
+import { readdir, readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
 import path from 'node:path';
-import { dist, requireDist, resolveFile } from './lib/dist.mjs';
-import { walk } from './lib/walk.mjs';
 
+const dist = path.resolve('dist');
 const allowedPreservedRoutes = new Set(['/fleeting/', '/reconcile/']);
 const failures = [];
 
-async function targetExists(pathname) {
-  if (allowedPreservedRoutes.has(pathname)) return true;
-  return (await resolveFile(pathname)) !== null;
+async function walk(dir) {
+  const entries = await readdir(dir, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+
+  return files;
 }
 
-await requireDist();
+async function exists(file) {
+  try {
+    return (await stat(file)).isFile();
+  } catch {
+    return false;
+  }
+}
+
+async function targetExists(pathname) {
+  if (allowedPreservedRoutes.has(pathname)) return true;
+
+  const safePath = path
+    .normalize(decodeURIComponent(pathname))
+    .replace(/^\/+/, '')
+    .replace(/^(\.\.(\/|\\|$))+/, '');
+  const candidate = path.join(dist, safePath);
+  const candidates = [
+    candidate,
+    path.join(candidate, 'index.html'),
+    path.join(dist, `${safePath}.html`),
+  ];
+
+  for (const file of candidates) {
+    if (await exists(file)) return true;
+  }
+  return false;
+}
+
+try {
+  await stat(dist);
+} catch {
+  throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
+}
 
 const files = await walk(dist);
 const checkedFiles = files.filter((file) => /\.(html|xml|css|webmanifest)$/.test(file));

scripts/check-no-em-dashes.mjs

@@ -1,6 +1,5 @@
-import { readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
+import { readdir, readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
 import path from 'node:path';
-import { walk } from './lib/walk.mjs';
 
 const forbidden = String.fromCodePoint(0x2014);
 const root = process.cwd();
@@ -15,6 +14,7 @@ const textExtensions = new Set([
   '.mjs',
   '.ts',
   '.txt',
+  '.vtt',
   '.webmanifest',
   '.xml',
 ]);
@@ -37,6 +37,25 @@ async function exists(filePath) {
   }
 }
 
+async function walk(entryPath) {
+  const entryStat = await stat(entryPath);
+  if (entryStat.isFile()) return [entryPath];
+
+  const entries = await readdir(entryPath, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(entryPath, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else if (entry.isFile()) {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+
+  return files;
+}
+
 function lineAndColumn(text, index) {
   const before = text.slice(0, index);
   const lines = before.split('\n');

scripts/check-no-github-links.mjs

@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
-// cspell:ignore githubusercontent streetsidesoftware forgejo
-import { readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
-import path from 'node:path';
-import { walk } from './lib/walk.mjs';
-
-const root = process.cwd();
-
-// GitHub is no longer linked from anywhere on the site: project source links,
-// the social links, and the repo metadata all point at the self-hosted git
-// host instead. Matching the host substrings (rather than the bare word
-// "github") keeps the Shiki `github-light`/`github-dark` themes and the
-// Forgejo Actions `github.*` context variables from tripping the check.
-const bannedHosts = [/github\.com/i, /github\.io/i, /githubusercontent\.com/i];
-
-// Upstream tooling URLs that genuinely live on GitHub and have no self-hosted
-// equivalent (e.g. the cspell config JSON Schema). A flagged URL is permitted
-// only when it exactly equals one of these.
-const permitted = new Set([
-  'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/streetsidesoftware/cspell/main/cspell.schema.json',
-]);
-
-const textExtensions = new Set([
-  '.astro',
-  '.css',
-  '.html',
-  '.js',
-  '.json',
-  '.md',
-  '.mjs',
-  '.ts',
-  '.txt',
-  '.webmanifest',
-  '.xml',
-]);
-
-const roots = [
-  'src',
-  'public',
-  'scripts',
-  'README.md',
-  'package.json',
-  'astro.config.mjs',
-  'cspell.json',
-].map((entry) => path.resolve(root, entry));
-
-async function exists(filePath) {
-  try {
-    await stat(filePath);
-    return true;
-  } catch {
-    return false;
-  }
-}
-
-// Grows a match outward to the whole whitespace/quote-delimited URL token so it
-// can be compared against the permitted set.
-function urlToken(line, index, length) {
-  const boundary = /[\s"'`<>()[\]{}]/;
-  let start = index;
-  while (start > 0 && !boundary.test(line[start - 1])) start -= 1;
-  let end = index + length;
-  while (end < line.length && !boundary.test(line[end])) end += 1;
-  return line.slice(start, end);
-}
-
-const files = [];
-
-for (const entry of roots) {
-  if (!(await exists(entry))) continue;
-  files.push(...(await walk(entry)));
-}
-
-const textFiles = files.filter((file) => textExtensions.has(path.extname(file)));
-
-const failures = [];
-
-for (const file of textFiles) {
-  const lines = (await readFile(file, 'utf8')).split('\n');
-
-  lines.forEach((line, lineIndex) => {
-    for (const pattern of bannedHosts) {
-      for (const match of line.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern, 'gi'))) {
-        const token = urlToken(line, match.index, match[0].length);
-        if (permitted.has(token)) continue;
-        const location = `${path.relative(root, file)}:${lineIndex + 1}:${match.index + 1}`;
-        failures.push(location);
-      }
-    }
-  });
-}
-
-if (failures.length > 0) {
-  console.error(
-    `GitHub links are not allowed; link the self-hosted git host instead:\n${failures.join('\n')}`
-  );
-  process.exit(1);
-}
-
-console.log('No GitHub links found.');

scripts/check-no-js.mjs

@@ -1,10 +1,30 @@
-import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
-import { dist, requireDist } from './lib/dist.mjs';
-import { walk } from './lib/walk.mjs';
+import { readdir, readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
+import path from 'node:path';
 
+const dist = path.resolve('dist');
 const failures = [];
 
-await requireDist();
+async function walk(dir) {
+  const entries = await readdir(dir, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+
+  return files;
+}
+
+try {
+  await stat(dist);
+} catch {
+  throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
+}
 
 const files = await walk(dist);
 const ALLOWED_JS_ASSET_PATTERNS = [

scripts/check-overflow.mjs

@@ -1,32 +1,200 @@
+import { createServer } from 'node:http';
+import { mkdir, readdir, readFile, rm, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
 import path from 'node:path';
-import {
-  CONTEXT_TIMEOUT_MS,
-  PAGE_TIMEOUT_MS,
-  cleanupBrowserTmp,
-  openBrowser,
-  safeCloseBrowser,
-  safeCloseContext,
-  safeClosePage,
-  setupBrowserTmp,
-  shouldRetryNavigation,
-  withTimeout,
-} from './lib/browser.mjs';
-import { discoverRoutes, requireDist, startDistServer } from './lib/dist.mjs';
+import { chromium } from 'playwright';
 
+const dist = path.resolve('dist');
 const browserTmp = path.resolve('.astro', 'playwright-overflow-tmp');
+const INDEX_FILE = 'index.html';
 const MAX_NAV_RETRIES = 4;
 // Common device widths: iPhone SE / Galaxy S / iPhone 14 / iPad portrait /
 // iPad landscape / common laptop / full HD desktop.
 const VIEWPORT_WIDTHS = [320, 390, 430, 768, 1024, 1440, 1920];
+const CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS = 3000;
+const LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS = 10000;
+const CONTEXT_TIMEOUT_MS = 8000;
+const PAGE_TIMEOUT_MS = 15000;
 const MEASURE_TIMEOUT_MS = 25000;
 
-await requireDist();
-await setupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+const MIME = {
+  '.html': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
+  '.css': 'text/css; charset=utf-8',
+  '.js': 'text/javascript; charset=utf-8',
+  '.svg': 'image/svg+xml',
+  '.png': 'image/png',
+  '.jpg': 'image/jpeg',
+  '.jpeg': 'image/jpeg',
+  '.webp': 'image/webp',
+  '.avif': 'image/avif',
+  '.ico': 'image/x-icon',
+  '.woff': 'font/woff',
+  '.woff2': 'font/woff2',
+  '.mp4': 'video/mp4',
+  '.webm': 'video/webm',
+  '.vtt': 'text/vtt; charset=utf-8',
+  '.pdf': 'application/pdf',
+};
+
+function contentType(file) {
+  const ext = path.extname(file).toLowerCase();
+  return MIME[ext] ?? 'application/octet-stream';
+}
+
+async function walk(dir) {
+  const entries = await readdir(dir, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+  return files;
+}
+
+async function discoverRoutes() {
+  const files = await walk(dist);
+  const routes = new Set();
+  for (const file of files) {
+    if (!file.endsWith('.html')) continue;
+    const rel = path.relative(dist, file).replaceAll(path.sep, '/');
+    if (rel === '404.html') continue;
+    if (rel === INDEX_FILE) {
+      routes.add('/');
+    } else if (rel.endsWith(`/${INDEX_FILE}`)) {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.slice(0, -INDEX_FILE.length));
+    } else {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.replace(/\.html$/, '/'));
+    }
+  }
+  return [...routes].sort();
+}
+
+async function resolveFile(url) {
+  const parsed = new URL(url, 'http://localhost');
+  const safePath = path
+    .normalize(decodeURIComponent(parsed.pathname))
+    .replace(/^\/+/, '')
+    .replace(/^(\.\.(\/|\\|$))+/, '');
+  const candidate = path.join(dist, safePath);
+  const candidates = [
+    candidate,
+    path.join(candidate, 'index.html'),
+    path.join(dist, `${safePath}.html`),
+  ];
+
+  for (const file of candidates) {
+    try {
+      const fileStat = await stat(file);
+      if (fileStat.isFile()) return file;
+    } catch {
+      // Try the next candidate.
+    }
+  }
+
+  return path.join(dist, '404.html');
+}
+
+try {
+  await stat(dist);
+} catch {
+  throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
+}
+
+// Some CI/dev containers mount /tmp as a very small tmpfs. Chromium uses the
+// process temp directory for profiles and internal files; putting it under the
+// already-ignored .astro/ directory keeps the overflow check reproducible even
+// when the system temp mount is full.
+await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true });
+await mkdir(browserTmp, { recursive: true });
+process.env.TMPDIR = browserTmp;
+process.env.TMP = browserTmp;
+process.env.TEMP = browserTmp;
 
 const routes = await discoverRoutes();
-const { server, port } = await startDistServer();
+
+const server = createServer(async (req, res) => {
+  try {
+    const file = await resolveFile(req.url ?? '/');
+    const body = await readFile(file);
+    res.writeHead(200, { 'content-type': contentType(file) });
+    res.end(body);
+  } catch (error) {
+    res.writeHead(500, { 'content-type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' });
+    res.end(String(error));
+  }
+});
+
+await new Promise((resolve) => server.listen(0, '127.0.0.1', resolve));
+const { port } = server.address();
 const failures = [];
 
+function launchBrowser() {
+  return chromium.launch({
+    headless: true,
+    env: {
+      ...process.env,
+      TMPDIR: browserTmp,
+      TMP: browserTmp,
+      TEMP: browserTmp,
+    },
+    args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox'],
+  });
+}
+
+async function withTimeout(promise, timeoutMs, label) {
+  let timeout;
+  try {
+    return await Promise.race([
+      promise,
+      new Promise((_, reject) => {
+        timeout = setTimeout(() => reject(new Error(label)), timeoutMs);
+      }),
+    ]);
+  } finally {
+    clearTimeout(timeout);
+  }
+}
+
+async function safeClosePage(page) {
+  await withTimeout(
+    page.close(),
+    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while closing Playwright page'
+  ).catch(() => {});
+}
+
+async function safeCloseContext(context) {
+  await withTimeout(
+    context.close(),
+    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while closing Playwright context'
+  ).catch(() => {});
+}
+
+async function safeCloseBrowser(browser) {
+  const childProcess = browser.process?.();
+  try {
+    await withTimeout(
+      browser.close(),
+      CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+      'Timed out while closing Chromium'
+    );
+  } catch {
+    childProcess?.kill('SIGKILL');
+  }
+}
+
+async function openBrowser() {
+  return withTimeout(
+    launchBrowser(),
+    LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while launching Chromium'
+  );
+}
+
 async function newMeasurementContext(browser, width) {
   const context = await browser.newContext({
     viewport: { width, height: 900 },
@@ -59,6 +227,13 @@ async function measureViewport(page) {
   }));
 }
 
+function shouldRetryNavigation(error) {
+  const message = error instanceof Error ? error.message : String(error);
+  return /ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES|Execution context was destroyed|Target.*closed|has been closed|Timed out while|navigation/i.test(
+    message
+  );
+}
+
 async function measureRoute(context, route) {
   let page;
   try {
@@ -88,7 +263,7 @@ try {
     let browser;
     let context;
     try {
-      browser = await openBrowser(browserTmp);
+      browser = await openBrowser();
       context = await openMeasurementContext(browser, width);
       for (const route of routes) {
         let result;
@@ -103,7 +278,7 @@ try {
             }
             await safeCloseContext(context);
             await safeCloseBrowser(browser);
-            browser = await openBrowser(browserTmp);
+            browser = await openBrowser();
             context = await openMeasurementContext(browser, width);
           }
         }
@@ -121,7 +296,7 @@ try {
   }
 } finally {
   server.close();
-  await cleanupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+  await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true }).catch(() => {});
 }
 
 if (failures.length > 0) {

scripts/check-preview-cropping.mjs

@@ -1,31 +1,115 @@
-import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
+import { createServer } from 'node:http';
+import { mkdir, readdir, readFile, rm, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
 import path from 'node:path';
-import {
-  CONTEXT_TIMEOUT_MS,
-  PAGE_TIMEOUT_MS,
-  cleanupBrowserTmp,
-  openBrowser,
-  safeCloseBrowser,
-  safeCloseContext,
-  safeClosePage,
-  setupBrowserTmp,
-  shouldRetryNavigation,
-  withTimeout,
-} from './lib/browser.mjs';
-import { discoverRoutes, requireDist, startDistServer } from './lib/dist.mjs';
+import { chromium } from 'playwright';
 
+const dist = path.resolve('dist');
 const previewCss = path.resolve('src/styles/global.css');
 const browserTmp = path.resolve('.astro', 'playwright-preview-cropping-tmp');
+const INDEX_FILE = 'index.html';
 const PREVIEW_SELECTOR = '[data-uncropped-preview]';
 // Common device widths: iPhone SE / Galaxy S / iPhone 14 / iPad portrait /
 // iPad landscape / common laptop / full HD desktop.
 const VIEWPORT_WIDTHS = [320, 390, 430, 768, 1024, 1440, 1920];
 const MAX_NAV_RETRIES = 4;
+const CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS = 3000;
+const LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS = 10000;
+const CONTEXT_TIMEOUT_MS = 8000;
+const PAGE_TIMEOUT_MS = 15000;
 const MEASURE_TIMEOUT_MS = 30000;
 const CLIP_TOLERANCE_PX = 0.75;
 const RATIO_TOLERANCE = 0.01;
 
-await requireDist();
+const MIME = {
+  '.html': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
+  '.css': 'text/css; charset=utf-8',
+  '.js': 'text/javascript; charset=utf-8',
+  '.svg': 'image/svg+xml',
+  '.png': 'image/png',
+  '.jpg': 'image/jpeg',
+  '.jpeg': 'image/jpeg',
+  '.webp': 'image/webp',
+  '.avif': 'image/avif',
+  '.ico': 'image/x-icon',
+  '.woff': 'font/woff',
+  '.woff2': 'font/woff2',
+  '.mp4': 'video/mp4',
+  '.webm': 'video/webm',
+  '.vtt': 'text/vtt; charset=utf-8',
+  '.pdf': 'application/pdf',
+};
+
+function contentType(file) {
+  const ext = path.extname(file).toLowerCase();
+  return MIME[ext] ?? 'application/octet-stream';
+}
+
+async function walk(dir) {
+  const entries = await readdir(dir, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+
+  return files;
+}
+
+async function discoverRoutes() {
+  const files = await walk(dist);
+  const routes = new Set();
+
+  for (const file of files) {
+    if (!file.endsWith('.html')) continue;
+    const rel = path.relative(dist, file).replaceAll(path.sep, '/');
+    if (rel === '404.html') continue;
+    if (rel === INDEX_FILE) {
+      routes.add('/');
+    } else if (rel.endsWith(`/${INDEX_FILE}`)) {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.slice(0, -INDEX_FILE.length));
+    } else {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.replace(/\.html$/, '/'));
+    }
+  }
+
+  return [...routes].sort();
+}
+
+async function resolveFile(url) {
+  const parsed = new URL(url, 'http://localhost');
+  const safePath = path
+    .normalize(decodeURIComponent(parsed.pathname))
+    .replace(/^\/+/, '')
+    .replace(/^(\.\.(\/|\\|$))+/, '');
+  const candidate = path.join(dist, safePath);
+  const candidates = [
+    candidate,
+    path.join(candidate, 'index.html'),
+    path.join(dist, `${safePath}.html`),
+  ];
+
+  for (const file of candidates) {
+    try {
+      const fileStat = await stat(file);
+      if (fileStat.isFile()) return file;
+    } catch {
+      // Try the next candidate.
+    }
+  }
+
+  return path.join(dist, '404.html');
+}
+
+try {
+  await stat(dist);
+} catch {
+  throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
+}
 
 function lineAndColumn(text, index) {
   const before = text.slice(0, index);
@@ -113,11 +197,95 @@ async function checkPreviewCroppingStyles() {
   return styleFailures;
 }
 
-await setupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+// Keep Chromium temp files inside the repo so the check is reproducible in CI
+// containers with very small /tmp mounts.
+await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true });
+await mkdir(browserTmp, { recursive: true });
+process.env.TMPDIR = browserTmp;
+process.env.TMP = browserTmp;
+process.env.TEMP = browserTmp;
 
 const routes = await discoverRoutes();
 const failures = await checkPreviewCroppingStyles();
-const { server, port } = await startDistServer();
+
+const server = createServer(async (req, res) => {
+  try {
+    const file = await resolveFile(req.url ?? '/');
+    const body = await readFile(file);
+    res.writeHead(200, { 'content-type': contentType(file) });
+    res.end(body);
+  } catch (error) {
+    res.writeHead(500, { 'content-type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' });
+    res.end(String(error));
+  }
+});
+
+await new Promise((resolve) => server.listen(0, '127.0.0.1', resolve));
+const { port } = server.address();
+
+function launchBrowser() {
+  return chromium.launch({
+    headless: true,
+    env: {
+      ...process.env,
+      TMPDIR: browserTmp,
+      TMP: browserTmp,
+      TEMP: browserTmp,
+    },
+    args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox'],
+  });
+}
+
+async function withTimeout(promise, timeoutMs, label) {
+  let timeout;
+  try {
+    return await Promise.race([
+      promise,
+      new Promise((_, reject) => {
+        timeout = setTimeout(() => reject(new Error(label)), timeoutMs);
+      }),
+    ]);
+  } finally {
+    clearTimeout(timeout);
+  }
+}
+
+async function safeClosePage(page) {
+  await withTimeout(
+    page.close(),
+    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while closing Playwright page'
+  ).catch(() => {});
+}
+
+async function safeCloseContext(context) {
+  await withTimeout(
+    context.close(),
+    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while closing Playwright context'
+  ).catch(() => {});
+}
+
+async function safeCloseBrowser(browser) {
+  const childProcess = browser.process?.();
+  try {
+    await withTimeout(
+      browser.close(),
+      CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
+      'Timed out while closing Chromium'
+    );
+  } catch {
+    childProcess?.kill('SIGKILL');
+  }
+}
+
+async function openBrowser() {
+  return withTimeout(
+    launchBrowser(),
+    LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS,
+    'Timed out while launching Chromium'
+  );
+}
 
 async function newMeasurementContext(browser, width) {
   const context = await browser.newContext({
@@ -283,6 +451,13 @@ async function inspectPreviews(page, route, width, phase, index = null) {
   );
 }
 
+function shouldRetryNavigation(error) {
+  const message = error instanceof Error ? error.message : String(error);
+  return /ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES|Execution context was destroyed|Target.*closed|has been closed|Timed out while|navigation/i.test(
+    message
+  );
+}
+
 async function measureRoute(context, route, width) {
   let page;
 
@@ -317,7 +492,7 @@ try {
     let context;
 
     try {
-      browser = await openBrowser(browserTmp);
+      browser = await openBrowser();
       context = await openMeasurementContext(browser, width);
 
       for (const route of routes) {
@@ -334,7 +509,7 @@ try {
 
             await safeCloseContext(context);
             await safeCloseBrowser(browser);
-            browser = await openBrowser(browserTmp);
+            browser = await openBrowser();
             context = await openMeasurementContext(browser, width);
           }
         }
@@ -348,7 +523,7 @@ try {
   }
 } finally {
   server.close();
-  await cleanupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+  await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true }).catch(() => {});
 }
 
 if (failures.length > 0) {

scripts/export-astro-audit.mjs

@@ -1,16 +1,11 @@
 import { spawn } from 'node:child_process';
 import { once } from 'node:events';
-import { mkdir, writeFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
+import { mkdir, readdir, rm, stat, writeFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
 import { createServer as createNetServer } from 'node:net';
 import path from 'node:path';
-import {
-  cleanupBrowserTmp,
-  openBrowser,
-  safeCloseBrowser,
-  setupBrowserTmp,
-} from './lib/browser.mjs';
-import { discoverRoutes, requireDist } from './lib/dist.mjs';
+import { chromium } from 'playwright';
 
+const dist = path.resolve('dist');
 const browserTmp = path.resolve('.astro', 'playwright-astro-audit-tmp');
 const outputJson = path.resolve(
   process.env.ASTRO_AUDIT_OUTPUT_JSON ?? '.astro/astro-audit-results.json'
@@ -24,6 +19,7 @@ const astroBin = path.resolve(
   process.platform === 'win32' ? 'astro.cmd' : 'astro'
 );
 const HOST = '127.0.0.1';
+const INDEX_FILE = 'index.html';
 const SERVER_START_TIMEOUT_MS = 60000;
 const CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS = 3000;
 const NAV_TIMEOUT_MS = 20000;
@@ -55,7 +51,21 @@ function parseViewports(raw = process.env.ASTRO_AUDIT_VIEWPORTS ?? DEFAULT_VIEWP
   });
 }
 
-async function discoverAuditRoutes() {
+async function walk(dir) {
+  const entries = await readdir(dir, { withFileTypes: true });
+  const files = [];
+  for (const entry of entries) {
+    const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
+    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
+      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
+    } else {
+      files.push(fullPath);
+    }
+  }
+  return files;
+}
+
+async function discoverRoutes() {
   if (process.env.ASTRO_AUDIT_ROUTES) {
     return process.env.ASTRO_AUDIT_ROUTES.split(',')
       .map((route) => route.trim())
@@ -63,8 +73,29 @@ async function discoverAuditRoutes() {
       .map((route) => (route.startsWith('/') ? route : `/${route}`));
   }
 
-  await requireDist();
-  return discoverRoutes();
+  try {
+    await stat(dist);
+  } catch {
+    throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
+  }
+
+  const files = await walk(dist);
+  const routes = new Set();
+  for (const file of files) {
+    if (!file.endsWith('.html')) continue;
+    const rel = path.relative(dist, file).replaceAll(path.sep, '/');
+    if (rel === '404.html') continue;
+
+    if (rel === INDEX_FILE) {
+      routes.add('/');
+    } else if (rel.endsWith(`/${INDEX_FILE}`)) {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.slice(0, -INDEX_FILE.length));
+    } else {
+      routes.add('/' + rel.replace(/\.html$/, '/'));
+    }
+  }
+
+  return [...routes].sort();
 }
 
 async function getFreePort() {
@@ -138,6 +169,20 @@ async function stopProcess(child) {
   }
 }
 
+async function safeCloseBrowser(browser) {
+  const childProcess = browser?.process?.();
+  try {
+    await Promise.race([
+      browser.close(),
+      sleep(CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS).then(() => {
+        throw new Error('Timed out while closing Chromium');
+      }),
+    ]);
+  } catch {
+    childProcess?.kill('SIGKILL');
+  }
+}
+
 function viewportLabel(viewport) {
   return `${viewport.width}x${viewport.height}`;
 }
@@ -340,15 +385,19 @@ function renderMarkdown(report) {
 }
 
 const viewports = parseViewports();
-const routes = await discoverAuditRoutes();
+const routes = await discoverRoutes();
 
 if (routes.length === 0) {
   throw new Error('No HTML routes found to audit.');
 }
 
-await setupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true });
+await mkdir(browserTmp, { recursive: true });
 await mkdir(path.dirname(outputJson), { recursive: true });
 await mkdir(path.dirname(outputMarkdown), { recursive: true });
+process.env.TMPDIR = browserTmp;
+process.env.TMP = browserTmp;
+process.env.TEMP = browserTmp;
 
 const port = await getFreePort();
 const baseUrl = `http://${HOST}:${port}/`;
@@ -360,7 +409,16 @@ try {
   devServer = startAstroDev(port);
   await waitForDevServer(baseUrl, devServer);
 
-  browser = await openBrowser(browserTmp);
+  browser = await chromium.launch({
+    headless: true,
+    env: {
+      ...process.env,
+      TMPDIR: browserTmp,
+      TMP: browserTmp,
+      TEMP: browserTmp,
+    },
+    args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox'],
+  });
 
   for (const viewport of viewports) {
     const context = await browser.newContext({
@@ -422,5 +480,5 @@ try {
 } finally {
   if (browser) await safeCloseBrowser(browser);
   if (devServer) await stopProcess(devServer);
-  await cleanupBrowserTmp(browserTmp);
+  await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true }).catch(() => {});
 }

scripts/lib/browser.mjs

@@ -1,89 +0,0 @@
-import { mkdir, rm } from 'node:fs/promises';
-import { chromium } from 'playwright';
-
-export const CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS = 3000;
-export const LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS = 10000;
-export const CONTEXT_TIMEOUT_MS = 8000;
-export const PAGE_TIMEOUT_MS = 15000;
-
-// Chromium puts profiles and internal files in the process temp directory.
-// Some CI/dev containers mount /tmp as a very small tmpfs, so the checks point
-// it at an already-ignored directory under .astro/ instead.
-export async function setupBrowserTmp(browserTmp) {
-  await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true });
-  await mkdir(browserTmp, { recursive: true });
-  process.env.TMPDIR = browserTmp;
-  process.env.TMP = browserTmp;
-  process.env.TEMP = browserTmp;
-}
-
-export async function cleanupBrowserTmp(browserTmp) {
-  await rm(browserTmp, { recursive: true, force: true }).catch(() => {});
-}
-
-export async function withTimeout(promise, timeoutMs, label) {
-  let timeout;
-  try {
-    return await Promise.race([
-      promise,
-      new Promise((_, reject) => {
-        timeout = setTimeout(() => reject(new Error(label)), timeoutMs);
-      }),
-    ]);
-  } finally {
-    clearTimeout(timeout);
-  }
-}
-
-export async function safeClosePage(page) {
-  await withTimeout(
-    page.close(),
-    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
-    'Timed out while closing Playwright page'
-  ).catch(() => {});
-}
-
-export async function safeCloseContext(context) {
-  await withTimeout(
-    context.close(),
-    CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
-    'Timed out while closing Playwright context'
-  ).catch(() => {});
-}
-
-export async function safeCloseBrowser(browser) {
-  const childProcess = browser.process?.();
-  try {
-    await withTimeout(
-      browser.close(),
-      CLOSE_TIMEOUT_MS,
-      'Timed out while closing Chromium'
-    );
-  } catch {
-    childProcess?.kill('SIGKILL');
-  }
-}
-
-export function openBrowser(browserTmp) {
-  return withTimeout(
-    chromium.launch({
-      headless: true,
-      env: {
-        ...process.env,
-        TMPDIR: browserTmp,
-        TMP: browserTmp,
-        TEMP: browserTmp,
-      },
-      args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox'],
-    }),
-    LAUNCH_TIMEOUT_MS,
-    'Timed out while launching Chromium'
-  );
-}
-
-export function shouldRetryNavigation(error) {
-  const message = error instanceof Error ? error.message : String(error);
-  return /ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES|Execution context was destroyed|Target.*closed|has been closed|Timed out while|navigation/i.test(
-    message
-  );
-}

scripts/lib/dist.mjs

@@ -1,107 +0,0 @@
-import { createServer } from 'node:http';
-import { readFile, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
-import path from 'node:path';
-import { walk } from './walk.mjs';
-
-export const dist = path.resolve('dist');
-
-const INDEX_FILE = 'index.html';
-
-export async function requireDist() {
-  try {
-    await stat(dist);
-  } catch {
-    throw new Error('dist/ does not exist. Run npm run build first.');
-  }
-}
-
-// Derives the site's route list from the HTML files in dist/.
-export async function discoverRoutes() {
-  const files = await walk(dist);
-  const routes = new Set();
-
-  for (const file of files) {
-    if (!file.endsWith('.html')) continue;
-    const rel = path.relative(dist, file).replaceAll(path.sep, '/');
-    if (rel === '404.html') continue;
-    if (rel === INDEX_FILE) {
-      routes.add('/');
-    } else if (rel.endsWith(`/${INDEX_FILE}`)) {
-      routes.add('/' + rel.slice(0, -INDEX_FILE.length));
-    } else {
-      routes.add('/' + rel.replace(/\.html$/, '/'));
-    }
-  }
-
-  return [...routes].sort();
-}
-
-// Maps a request URL (or pathname) to a file in dist/, mirroring static-host
-// semantics: the path itself, its directory index.html, or the extensionless
-// .html variant. Returns null when nothing matches.
-export async function resolveFile(url) {
-  const parsed = new URL(url, 'http://localhost');
-  const safePath = path
-    .normalize(decodeURIComponent(parsed.pathname))
-    .replace(/^\/+/, '')
-    .replace(/^(\.\.(\/|\\|$))+/, '');
-  const candidate = path.join(dist, safePath);
-  const candidates = [
-    candidate,
-    path.join(candidate, 'index.html'),
-    path.join(dist, `${safePath}.html`),
-  ];
-
-  for (const file of candidates) {
-    try {
-      const fileStat = await stat(file);
-      if (fileStat.isFile()) return file;
-    } catch {
-      // Try the next candidate.
-    }
-  }
-
-  return null;
-}
-
-const MIME = {
-  '.html': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
-  '.css': 'text/css; charset=utf-8',
-  '.js': 'text/javascript; charset=utf-8',
-  '.svg': 'image/svg+xml',
-  '.png': 'image/png',
-  '.jpg': 'image/jpeg',
-  '.jpeg': 'image/jpeg',
-  '.webp': 'image/webp',
-  '.avif': 'image/avif',
-  '.ico': 'image/x-icon',
-  '.woff': 'font/woff',
-  '.woff2': 'font/woff2',
-  '.mp4': 'video/mp4',
-  '.webm': 'video/webm',
-  '.pdf': 'application/pdf',
-};
-
-export function contentType(file) {
-  const ext = path.extname(file).toLowerCase();
-  return MIME[ext] ?? 'application/octet-stream';
-}
-
-// Serves dist/ on an ephemeral localhost port, falling back to 404.html.
-// Returns the server (callers own closing it) and the assigned port.
-export async function startDistServer() {
-  const server = createServer(async (req, res) => {
-    try {
-      const file = (await resolveFile(req.url ?? '/')) ?? path.join(dist, '404.html');
-      const body = await readFile(file);
-      res.writeHead(200, { 'content-type': contentType(file) });
-      res.end(body);
-    } catch (error) {
-      res.writeHead(500, { 'content-type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' });
-      res.end(String(error));
-    }
-  });
-
-  await new Promise((resolve) => server.listen(0, '127.0.0.1', resolve));
-  return { server, port: server.address().port };
-}

scripts/lib/walk.mjs

@@ -1,23 +0,0 @@
-import { readdir, stat } from 'node:fs/promises';
-import path from 'node:path';
-
-// Recursively lists every file under entryPath. A path that is itself a file
-// resolves to a single-element list, so callers can mix files and directories.
-export async function walk(entryPath) {
-  const entryStat = await stat(entryPath);
-  if (entryStat.isFile()) return [entryPath];
-
-  const entries = await readdir(entryPath, { withFileTypes: true });
-  const files = [];
-
-  for (const entry of entries) {
-    const fullPath = path.join(entryPath, entry.name);
-    if (entry.isDirectory()) {
-      files.push(...(await walk(fullPath)));
-    } else {
-      files.push(fullPath);
-    }
-  }
-
-  return files;
-}

src/components/ArticleList.astro

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ import TagList from './TagList.astro';
 import { ARTICLE_THUMBNAIL, articlePath, formatDate, formatDateShort } from '../lib/site';
 
 interface Props {
-  posts: CollectionEntry<'work'>[];
+  posts: CollectionEntry<'posts'>[];
   showYear?: boolean;
   tagLimit?: number;
   timeline?: boolean;
@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ const {
               </a>
             </h3>
             <p>{post.data.description}</p>
-            <TagList tags={post.data.article?.tags ?? []} limit={tagLimit} />
+            <TagList tags={post.data.tags} limit={tagLimit} />
           </article>
           <time datetime={post.data.date.toISOString()}>
             {showYear ? formatDate(post.data.date) : formatDateShort(post.data.date)}

src/components/AtAGlance.astro

@@ -2,22 +2,34 @@
 import type { CollectionEntry } from 'astro:content';
 import ProjectLinks from './ProjectLinks.astro';
 
-type Link = CollectionEntry<'work'>['data']['links'][number];
+type Link = CollectionEntry<'projects'>['data']['links'][number];
 
 interface Props {
+  role?: string;
   projectPeriod?: string;
   stack?: string[];
   scale?: string;
+  outcome?: string;
   links?: Link[];
   headingId: string;
 }
 
-const { projectPeriod, stack = [], scale, links = [], headingId } = Astro.props;
+const {
+  role,
+  projectPeriod,
+  stack = [],
+  scale,
+  outcome,
+  links = [],
+  headingId,
+} = Astro.props;
 
 const rows: Array<[string, string]> = [];
+if (role) rows.push(['Role', role]);
 if (projectPeriod) rows.push(['Period', projectPeriod]);
 if (stack.length > 0) rows.push(['Stack', stack.join(', ')]);
 if (scale) rows.push(['Scale', scale]);
+if (outcome) rows.push(['Outcome', outcome]);
 ---
 
 {

src/components/Footer.astro

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ const year = new Date().getFullYear();
     <address class="footer-contact">
       <a href={`mailto:${site.email}`}>Email</a>
       <a href={site.cv} rel="noopener">CV</a>
-      <a href={site.git} rel="noopener me">Git</a>
+      <a href={site.github} rel="noopener me">GitHub</a>
       <a href={site.linkedin} rel="noopener me">LinkedIn</a>
     </address>
   </div>

src/components/Header.astro

@@ -1,7 +1,11 @@
 ---
-import { THEME_BG, navItems, normalizeTrailingSlash, site } from '../lib/site';
+import { navItems, site } from '../lib/site';
 
-const current = normalizeTrailingSlash(Astro.url.pathname);
+const currentPath = Astro.url.pathname;
+const current =
+  currentPath === '/' || currentPath.endsWith('/') || /\.[^/]+$/.test(currentPath)
+    ? currentPath
+    : `${currentPath}/`;
 
 // Exact match for the current page; section match (descendant URLs) for
 // ancestor links. `aria-current="page"` is reserved for the exact page,
@@ -88,16 +92,17 @@ const headerNavItems = navItems.filter((item) => item.href !== '/' && !item.foot
   </div>
 </header>
 
-<script is:inline data-theme-script define:vars={{ THEME_BG }}>
+<script is:inline data-theme-script>
   // Co-located with the button so the initial aria state is set as soon as the
   // button parses, avoiding a flash of the wrong icon. The theme itself is
-  // already on <html> from theme-init.js in <head>. THEME_BG is injected from
-  // src/lib/site.ts via define:vars.
+  // already on <html> from theme-init.js in <head>.
   (function () {
     var root = document.documentElement;
     var switcher = document.getElementById('theme-switcher');
     if (!switcher) return;
 
+    // Keep in sync with --color-bg in global.css and theme-init.js.
+    var THEME_BG = { light: '#fbfaf7', dark: '#201f1d' };
     var themeColorMetas = document.querySelectorAll('meta[name="theme-color"]');
 
     function sync(theme) {

src/components/PostMedia.astro

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 ---
+import type { CollectionEntry } from 'astro:content';
 import PostMediaFigure from './PostMediaFigure.astro';
-import type { WorkMedia } from '../lib/site';
 
-type MediaItem = WorkMedia;
+type MediaItem = CollectionEntry<'posts'>['data']['media'][number];
 
 interface Props {
   items: MediaItem[];

src/components/PostMediaFigure.astro

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 ---
+import type { CollectionEntry } from 'astro:content';
 import { Picture } from 'astro:assets';
-import type { WorkMedia } from '../lib/site';
 
-type MediaItem = WorkMedia;
+type MediaItem = CollectionEntry<'posts'>['data']['media'][number];
 
 interface Props {
   item: MediaItem;
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ const videoHeight = item.type === 'video' ? (item.poster?.height ?? 720) : undef
   {
     item.type === 'video' ? (
       // Decorative videos stay inert and hidden from assistive tech. Meaningful
-      // videos expose controls and an accessible name.
+      // videos expose controls, captions, and an accessible name.
       item.decorative ? (
         <video
           muted
@@ -40,17 +40,26 @@ const videoHeight = item.type === 'video' ? (item.poster?.height ?? 720) : undef
           poster={item.poster?.src}
           width={videoWidth}
           height={videoHeight}
-          aria-label={item.caption}
+          aria-label={item.alt}
         >
           {item.webm && <source src={item.webm} type="video/webm" />}
           {item.mp4 && <source src={item.mp4} type="video/mp4" />}
+          {item.captions && (
+            <track
+              kind="captions"
+              src={item.captions}
+              srclang="en"
+              label={item.captionsLabel}
+              default
+            />
+          )}
         </video>
       )
     ) : (
       item.src && (
         <Picture
           src={item.src}
-          alt={item.decorative ? '' : (item.caption ?? '')}
+          alt={item.decorative ? '' : (item.alt ?? '')}
           formats={['avif', 'webp']}
           widths={[480, 960, 1280, 1920]}
           sizes="(max-width: 700px) calc(100vw - 2 * clamp(20px, 4vw, 32px)), (max-width: 1100px) min(calc(100vw - 4rem), 56rem), 56rem"

src/components/PostThumbnail.astro

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ import VideoThumbnail from './VideoThumbnail.astro';
 import { absoluteUrl, getHeaderVideo } from '../lib/site';
 
 interface Props {
-  post: CollectionEntry<'work'>;
+  post: CollectionEntry<'posts'>;
 }
 
 const { post } = Astro.props;
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ const headerVideo = getHeaderVideo(post);
 const demoLink = post.data.links.find(
   (link) => !link.download && link.label.trim().toLowerCase() === 'demo'
 );
-const iframeUrl = post.data.article?.iframeThumbnail ? demoLink?.url : undefined;
+const iframeUrl = post.data.iframeThumbnail ? demoLink?.url : undefined;
 const iframeSrc = iframeUrl?.startsWith('/') ? absoluteUrl(iframeUrl) : iframeUrl;
 const iframeTitle = demoLink
   ? `${demoLink.label}: ${post.data.title}`

src/components/ProjectLinks.astro

@@ -1,14 +1,17 @@
 ---
 import type { CollectionEntry } from 'astro:content';
-import { isExternal } from '../lib/site';
 
-type Link = CollectionEntry<'work'>['data']['links'][number];
+type Link = CollectionEntry<'projects'>['data']['links'][number];
 
 interface Props {
   links: Link[];
 }
 
 const { links } = Astro.props;
+
+function isExternal(url: string) {
+  return /^https?:\/\//.test(url);
+}
 ---
 
 {

src/components/ProjectList.astro

@@ -1,18 +1,13 @@
 ---
 import type { CollectionEntry } from 'astro:content';
+import { getEntry } from 'astro:content';
 import EntryThumbnail from './EntryThumbnail.astro';
 import VideoThumbnail from './VideoThumbnail.astro';
-import {
-  PROJECT_THUMBNAIL,
-  articlePath,
-  entrySlug,
-  getHeaderVideo,
-  isExternal,
-  projectCard,
-} from '../lib/site';
+import type { HeaderVideo } from '../lib/site';
+import { PROJECT_THUMBNAIL, articlePath, entrySlug, getHeaderVideo } from '../lib/site';
 
 interface Props {
-  projects: CollectionEntry<'work'>[];
+  projects: CollectionEntry<'projects'>[];
   // Opt-in: eagerly load thumbnails that are reliably above the fold. Lists
   // below substantial content should leave this at zero.
   eagerFirstThumbnail?: boolean;
@@ -25,15 +20,27 @@ const {
   eagerThumbnailCount = eagerFirstThumbnail ? 1 : 0,
 } = Astro.props;
 
-// Project and article are the same entry now. A card links to its article when
-// the entry has a published (non-draft) `article` facet; an entry without one
-// is a project card with no article page. When that article has a header video,
-// the card thumbnail becomes a click-to-play poster (the card body still opens
-// the project site).
-function publishedArticleHref(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
-  const article = project.data.article;
-  if (!article || article.draft) return undefined;
-  return articlePath(project);
+function isExternal(url: string) {
+  return /^https?:\/\//.test(url);
+}
+
+// The `essay` field is a `reference('posts')`, so when present it's always a
+// `{ collection, id }` shape that `getEntry` resolves to a CollectionEntry.
+// Drafts are skipped because their article page is not built. A project may
+// have no essay (no article) just as an article may have no project; the
+// relationship is optional in both directions.
+const essayHrefs = new Map<string, string>();
+// When the linked article has a header video, the card thumbnail becomes a
+// click-to-play poster (the card body still opens the project site).
+const essayVideos = new Map<string, HeaderVideo>();
+for (const project of projects) {
+  const essay = project.data.essay;
+  if (!essay) continue;
+  const resolved = await getEntry(essay);
+  if (!resolved || resolved.data.draft) continue;
+  essayHrefs.set(project.id, articlePath(resolved));
+  const headerVideo = getHeaderVideo(resolved);
+  if (headerVideo) essayVideos.set(project.id, headerVideo);
 }
 
 // The whole card opens the project's website: the first link that isn't a
@@ -41,7 +48,7 @@ function publishedArticleHref(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
 // The Open button is that link, and its overlay makes the entire card
 // clickable. Projects without such a link have no Open button and are not
 // clickable; their article, if any, is reachable through the Article link.
-function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
+function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'projects'>) {
   return project.data.links.find((link) => !link.download)?.url;
 }
 ---
@@ -51,9 +58,8 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
     projects.map((project, index) => {
       const anchor = entrySlug(project);
       const titleId = `${anchor}-title`;
-      const card = projectCard(project);
-      const essayHref = publishedArticleHref(project);
-      const headerVideo = essayHref ? getHeaderVideo(project) : undefined;
+      const essayHref = essayHrefs.get(project.id);
+      const headerVideo = essayVideos.get(project.id);
       const website = websiteUrl(project);
       const websiteExternal = website ? isExternal(website) : false;
       const eager = index < eagerThumbnailCount;
@@ -64,8 +70,8 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
             <VideoThumbnail
               class="entry-thumbnail project-thumbnail"
               variant="card"
-              poster={card.thumbnail.src}
-              alt={card.thumbnail.alt}
+              poster={project.data.thumbnail.src}
+              alt={project.data.thumbnail.alt}
               video={headerVideo}
               widths={PROJECT_THUMBNAIL.widths}
               sizes={PROJECT_THUMBNAIL.sizes}
@@ -74,8 +80,8 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
             />
           ) : (
             <EntryThumbnail
-              src={card.thumbnail.src}
-              alt={card.thumbnail.alt}
+              src={project.data.thumbnail.src}
+              alt={project.data.thumbnail.alt}
               class="project-thumbnail"
               widths={PROJECT_THUMBNAIL.widths}
               sizes={PROJECT_THUMBNAIL.sizes}
@@ -85,8 +91,8 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
           )}
           <article class="project-card__summary">
             <div class="project-card__head">
-              <h3 id={titleId}>{card.title}</h3>
-              <p class="project-description">{card.description}</p>
+              <h3 id={titleId}>{project.data.title}</h3>
+              <p class="project-description">{project.data.description}</p>
             </div>
             {(essayHref || website) && (
               <div class="project-card__actions">
@@ -94,7 +100,7 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
                   <a
                     class="project-article-link"
                     href={essayHref}
-                    aria-label={`Read the article about ${card.title}`}
+                    aria-label={`Read the article about ${project.data.title}`}
                   >
                     Article
                     <span aria-hidden="true">→</span>
@@ -108,8 +114,8 @@ function websiteUrl(project: CollectionEntry<'work'>) {
                     target={websiteExternal ? '_blank' : undefined}
                     aria-label={
                       websiteExternal
-                        ? `Open the ${card.title} site in a new tab`
-                        : `Open ${card.title}`
+                        ? `Open the ${project.data.title} site in a new tab`
+                        : `Open ${project.data.title}`
                     }
                   >
                     Open

src/components/VideoThumbnail.astro

@@ -90,7 +90,7 @@ const playScript = `
     class="video-thumbnail__play"
     type="button"
     data-video-play
-    aria-label={`Play video: ${video.caption ?? alt}`}
+    aria-label={`Play video: ${video.alt ?? alt}`}
   >
     <span class="video-thumbnail__play-icon" aria-hidden="true">
       <svg viewBox="0 0 24 24" focusable="false">
@@ -106,11 +106,22 @@ const playScript = `
     preload="none"
     playsinline
     poster={video.poster?.src}
-    aria-label={video.caption}
+    aria-label={video.alt}
     hidden
   >
     {video.webm && <source src={video.webm} type="video/webm" />}
     {video.mp4 && <source src={video.mp4} type="video/mp4" />}
+    {
+      video.captions && (
+        <track
+          kind="captions"
+          src={video.captions}
+          srclang="en"
+          label={video.captionsLabel}
+          default
+        />
+      )
+    }
   </video>
 
   <noscript>

src/content.config.ts

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-import { defineCollection } from 'astro:content';
+import { defineCollection, reference } from 'astro:content';
 import type { SchemaContext } from 'astro:content';
 import { glob } from 'astro/loaders';
 import { z } from 'astro/zod';
@@ -41,17 +41,6 @@ function isIframeUrl(url: string) {
   }
 }
 
-export const TAGS = [
-  'ai',
-  'systems',
-  'graphics',
-  'simulation',
-  'embedded',
-  'web',
-  'tools',
-  'games',
-] as const;
-
 const linkSchema = z.object({
   label: z.string(),
   url: linkUrl,
@@ -64,23 +53,13 @@ const thumbnailSchema = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
     alt: z.string().min(1, 'Thumbnail alt text must not be empty.'),
   });
 
-// Thumbnail override used by the project card to swap just the image when the
-// card wants a different crop from the article. The alt text is never
-// overridden, so it stays a single source of truth on the top-level thumbnail.
-const thumbnailOverrideSchema = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
-  z.object({
-    src: image(),
-  });
-
-// The caption is the single source of truth for a media item's text: it shows
-// as the visible <figcaption> and doubles as the image alt / accessible name,
-// so meaningful media carries one string instead of a caption/alt pair.
 const mediaSchema = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
   z
     .discriminatedUnion('type', [
       z.object({
         type: z.enum(['image', 'diagram']),
         src: image(),
+        alt: z.string().optional(),
         decorative: z.boolean().optional(),
         caption: z.string().optional(),
         transcript: z.string().optional(),
@@ -91,6 +70,9 @@ const mediaSchema = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
           poster: image().optional(),
           mp4: mediaUrl.optional(),
           webm: mediaUrl.optional(),
+          captions: mediaUrl.optional(),
+          captionsLabel: z.string().default('English captions'),
+          alt: z.string().optional(),
           decorative: z.boolean().optional(),
           caption: z.string().optional(),
           transcript: z.string().optional(),
@@ -99,72 +81,89 @@ const mediaSchema = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
           message: 'Video media needs at least one mp4 or webm source.',
         }),
     ])
-    .refine((item) => item.decorative || Boolean(item.caption), {
-      message: 'Meaningful media needs a caption.',
-    });
+    .refine((item) => item.decorative || (Boolean(item.alt) && Boolean(item.caption)), {
+      message: 'Meaningful media needs both alt text and a caption.',
+    })
+    .refine(
+      (item) => item.type !== 'video' || item.decorative || Boolean(item.captions),
+      {
+        message: 'Meaningful video needs captions.',
+      }
+    )
+    .refine(
+      (item) => item.type !== 'video' || item.decorative || Boolean(item.transcript),
+      {
+        message: 'Meaningful video needs a transcript.',
+      }
+    );
 
-// A single collection where each entry can carry an `article` facet (a written
-// page under /articles/<slug>), a `project` facet (a card in the /projects/
-// index), or both. Fields shared by both facets live at the top level and are
-// written once; the few where the project card deliberately differs from the
-// article are overridden inside `project`. The markdown body is the article's
-// content.
-const articleFacet = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
-  z.object({
-    updated: z.coerce.date().optional(),
-    draft: z.boolean().default(false),
-    iframeThumbnail: z.boolean().default(false),
-    featuredOrder: z.number().optional(),
-    tags: z.array(z.enum(TAGS)).default([]),
-    stack: z.array(z.string()).optional(),
-    scale: z.string().min(1).optional(),
-    media: z.array(mediaSchema({ image })).default([]),
-  });
-
-const projectFacet = ({ image }: SchemaContext) =>
-  z.object({
-    selected: z.boolean().default(false),
-    // Card chips. When omitted, the card falls back to the article's `stack`.
-    technologies: z.array(z.string()).optional(),
-    // Card overrides. When omitted, the card uses the top-level value.
-    title: z.string().optional(),
-    thumbnail: thumbnailOverrideSchema({ image }).optional(),
-  });
-
-const work = defineCollection({
-  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.md', base: './src/content/work' }),
+const posts = defineCollection({
+  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.md', base: './src/content/posts' }),
   schema: ({ image }) =>
     z
       .object({
-        // Shared identity (single source of truth).
         title: z.string(),
         description: z.string().max(160),
-        thumbnail: thumbnailSchema({ image }),
-        period: z.string().min(1).optional(),
         date: z.coerce.date(),
+        updated: z.coerce.date().optional(),
+        draft: z.boolean().default(false),
+        thumbnail: thumbnailSchema({ image }),
+        iframeThumbnail: z.boolean().default(false),
+        tags: z.array(
+          z.enum([
+            'ai',
+            'systems',
+            'graphics',
+            'simulation',
+            'embedded',
+            'web',
+            'tools',
+            'games',
+          ])
+        ),
+        featuredOrder: z.number().optional(),
+        projectPeriod: z.string().optional(),
+        role: z.string().optional(),
+        stack: z.array(z.string()).optional(),
+        scale: z.string().optional(),
+        outcome: z.string().optional(),
+        audience: z
+          .enum(['general', 'technical', 'recruiter-relevant'])
+          .default('technical'),
         links: z.array(linkSchema).default([]),
-
-        article: articleFacet({ image }).optional(),
-        project: projectFacet({ image }).optional(),
-      })
-      .refine((entry) => Boolean(entry.article) || Boolean(entry.project), {
-        message: 'An entry needs at least an `article` or a `project` facet.',
+        media: z.array(mediaSchema({ image })).default([]),
       })
       .refine(
-        (entry) =>
-          !entry.article?.iframeThumbnail ||
-          entry.links.some(
+        (post) =>
+          !post.iframeThumbnail ||
+          post.links.some(
             (link) =>
               !link.download &&
               link.label.trim().toLowerCase() === 'demo' &&
               isIframeUrl(link.url)
           ),
         {
-          path: ['article', 'iframeThumbnail'],
+          path: ['iframeThumbnail'],
           message:
             'iframeThumbnail requires a non-download Demo link with an https or root-relative URL.',
         }
       ),
 });
 
-export const collections = { work };
+const projects = defineCollection({
+  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.md', base: './src/content/projects' }),
+  schema: ({ image }) =>
+    z.object({
+      title: z.string(),
+      description: z.string().max(160),
+      thumbnail: thumbnailSchema({ image }),
+      period: z.string(),
+      sortDate: z.coerce.date(),
+      technologies: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
+      selected: z.boolean().default(false),
+      essay: reference('posts').optional(),
+      links: z.array(linkSchema).default([]),
+    }),
+});
+
+export const collections = { posts, projects };

src/content/posts/ad-astra-attiny85-game-engine.md

@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: A 50 FPS Game Engine on an 8-Bit Microcontroller
+description: 'A handheld game built from the PCB up: ATtiny85V, OLED, IR receiver, EEPROM, 8 MHz 8-bit ALU. 50 FPS floor.'
+date: 2026-05-06
+projectPeriod: 'Spring 2020'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/ad-astra.jpg
+  alt: The Ad Astra game running on a small OLED display.
+tags: ['embedded', 'games', 'systems']
+role: Hardware and firmware author
+stack: ['C', 'ATtiny85V', 'SPI OLED', 'IR receiver', 'EEPROM', 'KiCad']
+scale: 8 MHz, 8-bit ALU, ~31 mW at full brightness, ~1.5 mA standby, 15–20 ms frame budget
+outcome: A handheld built from schematic to firmware, with a 50 FPS game on it
+audience: technical
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/ad_astra
+media:
+  - type: video
+    poster: ./_assets/ad-astra.jpg
+    webm: /media/video/ad_astra.webm
+    mp4: /media/video/ad_astra.mp4
+    captions: /media/video/ad_astra.vtt
+    alt: Video demonstration of the embedded game running on a small OLED display.
+    caption: The whole thing, from board and firmware to sprites and game loop, runs on a single ATtiny85V at 8 MHz.
+    transcript: No spoken dialogue. The handheld board runs its OLED game; the player moves through the small display while the IR input controls gameplay.
+---
+
+I'd done microcontroller work on dev boards before and it always felt like I was renting the hardware. As soon as I had a real board with my own soldering on it, bugs stopped feeling like software inconveniences and started feeling like consequences of choices I'd made in KiCad. That shift was most of the value of doing it this way. Four years on from [my first hardware project](/articles/lights-synchronized-to-music/), the lesson was that owning the whole stack down to the copper changes how you debug.
+
+This one is a handheld game built from the PCB up around an ATtiny85V: 8-bit ALU at 8 MHz, no FPU, no SIMD, 8 KB of flash. Anything I built had to fit inside that, or I'd be staring at a brick.
+
+## The bits worth showing
+
+- **SIMD-on-an-8-bit-ALU display driver.** The OLED is 128×64 monochrome, 1024 bytes per frame. The driver packs four pixels into a byte and processes them with bit-parallel tricks. That's how the frame budget stayed under 20 ms with room for game logic.
+- **Prototype-based inheritance, in C.** Entities share behaviour by pointing at a struct of function pointers. No vtable, no class, no allocator. Cheap dispatch and the whole object model fits on one screen.
+- **Atomic EEPROM commits.** Sprite data and save state both live in EEPROM. The commit path writes a new region, then swaps a tiny header pointer. Pull the battery mid-write and the previous version is intact.
+- **PNG-to-C sprite pipeline.** A Python script turns PNG artwork into static C arrays the firmware can include directly. Asset workflow without ever leaving the source tree.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- **A host-side emulator.** Debugging firmware directly on hardware was character-building and slow. A small SDL-based simulator linking the same C code would have shortened the iteration loop from "reflash and hope" to "rebuild and run."
+- **Power numbers I'd actually trust.** I have peak and standby draw. I don't have a curve over a real gameplay session, so I honestly can't say how long the battery lasts under load. I can only say it outlasted my patience.
+- **A development log for the driver.** The display driver and the EEPROM commit protocol are the parts I'd still defend. They deserved diagrams and measurements at the time, not the half page of comments I left them with.

src/content/posts/avoid-early-web-game.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: Avoid
+description: My first browser game. Tiny, archived for honesty.
+date: 2026-04-29
+projectPeriod: 'January 2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/avoid.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of the Avoid web game.
+tags: ['games', 'web']
+role: Game author
+stack: ['JavaScript', 'Canvas']
+outcome: My first browser game; kept for the timeline
+audience: general
+---
+
+Keeping it here because pretending the older work didn't happen would be dishonest. The first browser game I wrote, January 2018. It isn't good, but it was the moment a `<canvas>` element stopped being mysterious.

src/content/posts/backup-container-btrfs-borg.md

@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+---
+title: Backing Up Running Databases Without Stopping Them
+description: A Bash container around BorgBackup. BTRFS snapshots give atomic consistency, numeric env vars give multi-target 3-2-1, the loop is sleep not cron.
+date: 2026-05-29
+projectPeriod: '2024-2026'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/backup.png
+  alt: Placeholder thumbnail for the backup container post.
+tags: ['systems', 'tools']
+role: Container and script author
+stack: ['Bash', 'BorgBackup', 'BTRFS', 'Alpine', 'Docker', 'SSH', 'zstd']
+scale: One container, multiple targets per host, two years of restored incidents
+outcome: A self-hosted backup that has survived every actual incident I've thrown at it
+audience: technical
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/backup-container
+  - label: Container image
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/backup-container/pkgs/container/backup-container
+---
+
+Once you self-host a few services with live databases, the backup question stops being theoretical. A Postgres or SQLite file half-written when `tar` reads it goes into the archive in a state nothing on Earth will replay; you just don't find out until the restore. Two years in, with multiple incidents I had to actually recover from (including the photos behind the [e-ink frame](/articles/frame-eink-photo-display/)), I trust this stack precisely because the correctness argument is short: BTRFS gives me an atomic snapshot, and everything above it can be a shell script. One Alpine container, ~75 lines of Bash, pushes that snapshot to one or more [Borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/) repositories on a fixed interval. Multi-target is numeric env vars (`BORG_REPO_0`, `BORG_REPO_1`, ...). No config format, no DSL; the env file is the configuration.
+
+## The problem the snapshot solves
+
+I self-host several databases that are mid-write at every moment of the day. `tar | borg create` against the live volume is a race: a Postgres or SQLite file that's half-written when borg reads it goes into the archive in a state nothing on Earth can replay. The "right" answer is to coordinate a quiesce with every database: a fan-out of `pg_dump`, SQLite `.backup`, Redis `BGSAVE`, and so on, all with retry, timeouts, and per-app credentials.
+
+The cheaper answer, if you've put everything on one BTRFS volume, is `btrfs subvolume snapshot`. It returns instantly with a copy-on-write fork of the entire filesystem. Every file is now atomically consistent at exactly the same instant. Run borg against the snapshot, not against the live volume.
+
+```bash
+btrfs subvolume snapshot /btrfs-root /snapshot
+cd "/snapshot/btrfs-root${BACKUP_RELATIVE_PATH:-}"
+borg create ... ::"{hostname}-{now:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S}" .
+```
+
+The snapshot lives only for the duration of the borg run. A `trap cleanup EXIT` deletes the subvolume whether the backup succeeded, failed, or was killed. The next run snapshots fresh.
+
+This shifts the entire correctness argument from "did I quiesce every database in time" to "does BTRFS give me a consistent snapshot." It does. That's why everything below it can be a shell script.
+
+## Multi-target as numeric env vars
+
+The 3-2-1 backup rule wants three copies, two media, one offsite. My answer is a remote (rsync.net) and a local HDD, both fed from the same snapshot. The wire format for "multiple targets" is just numbered env vars:
+
+```sh
+BORG_PASSPHRASE_0=...
+BORG_REMOTE_PATH_0=borg1
+BORG_REPO_0=username@username.rsync.net:~/backup
+
+BORG_PASSPHRASE_1=...
+BORG_REPO_1=/local-backup
+```
+
+`backup-wrapper.sh` loops `index=0` upward, exports `BORG_PASSPHRASE` / `BORG_REPO` / `BORG_REMOTE_PATH` from the indexed copies, runs `backup.sh`, unsets them, increments. Stops the first time the next index has no passphrase.
+
+There's also a no-index fallback (`BORG_REPO=...` with no number) for the single-target case. Same script, no extra config plane.
+
+I keep coming back to this pattern for small-system orchestration. The env file _is_ the data structure. There's no YAML parsing, no JSON schema, no config-validation layer between you and the variable that actually matters.
+
+## The scheduler is a sleep, not cron
+
+```bash
+while true; do
+    /src/backup-wrapper.sh 2>&1 | log_message
+    sleep "$SLEEP_TIME"
+done
+```
+
+A comment in the file says it out loud: "Using a simple sleep loop to schedule backups instead of cron to avoid concurrency issues." Cron with a one-hour cadence and a backup that occasionally takes 70 minutes will eventually overlap itself. The sleep-loop can't: the next run starts when the previous one is done, plus the interval. One process, one snapshot, one borg invocation. Concurrency bugs you can't have are concurrency bugs you don't have.
+
+## Healthcheck is a file mtime
+
+`borg create` succeeded? Write `date > /health/backup_completion_time.log`. The Docker healthcheck shells out every 10 seconds and compares that mtime against `MAX_BACKUP_AGE_SECONDS` (default 86400). Older than that, container is unhealthy and whatever's watching containers (in my case a notification hook) finds out.
+
+Two subtleties worth naming:
+
+- **First-boot grace period.** If `backup_completion_time.log` doesn't exist yet (fresh container, first backup still running), fall back to `container_start_time.log` so the container isn't reported unhealthy during the first scheduled run.
+- **Partial success is not success.** In multi-target mode, the completion log is only written if _every_ target succeeded. One repo failing means the healthcheck stays red even if the other two are fine. Stale-but-quiet was the failure mode I wanted to make impossible.
+
+## Smaller calls
+
+- **`borg break-lock` at the start of every run.** If the previous container was killed mid-backup, the repo is locked and the next `borg create` will hang. Just break it. There's only ever one writer because of the sleep loop.
+- **`set -e` after `borg init`, not before.** The init line is the only one allowed to fail (first run on a fresh repo). Everything after halts on error.
+- **`BORG_RSH='ssh -oBatchMode=yes'`.** Fail fast if SSH would have prompted, instead of hanging forever inside a detached container.
+- **`ServerAliveInterval 30` in `ssh_config`.** Long borg transfers across home-ISP NAT get killed if nothing flows for a few minutes. Keepalives keep the tunnel open.
+- **`--files-cache=ctime,size,inode`.** The default `mtime,size,inode` re-hashes files when their mtime changes; on BTRFS, ctime is the more honest signal of "this content actually changed."
+- **`compression=zstd,12`.** The sweet spot for backup data on my hardware: substantially better than zlib, not so slow it dominates the run.
+- **`borg compact --threshold=5 --cleanup-commits`.** Reclaims space from pruned archives whenever the segment-file fragmentation crosses 5%.
+- **`IGNORE_GIT_UNTRACKED=true`.** Optional. Walks every `.git` dir under the snapshot, runs `git ls-files --others --exclude-standard`, and feeds the result into `--exclude-from`. Skips `target/`, `node_modules/`, build caches; anything the repo already knows isn't worth keeping.
+- **`SYS_ADMIN` capability on the container.** Needed for `btrfs subvolume snapshot` and `delete` from inside the namespace. The narrower capability set didn't have a way through.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- **A test rig that restores into an empty volume on a schedule.** "Backups exist" is not the property I care about. "Backups restore" is. I have anecdotal evidence after every incident; I don't have a green checkmark before one.
+- **A failure notifier separate from the healthcheck.** Docker healthcheck-unhealthy is one signal; I'd also want an explicit push (ntfy, email, Telegram) on first failure of a run, so I don't have to be watching the container state.
+- **Parallel targets when network and disk don't compete.** The current loop is strictly sequential: rsync.net then local HDD. They share neither bandwidth nor spindles; they could run in parallel and halve the wall-clock. Sequential made the wrapper trivial; the trade was knowable and I made it.
+
+Two years in, the part I'd defend hardest is the snapshot. Everything above it is a wrapper that could be rewritten in an afternoon. The snapshot is what makes the wrapper allowed to be one.

src/content/posts/city-simulation-unity-traffic.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: A Unity City Where Bad PLC Code Made Cars Crash
+description: A REST-controlled traffic-light sim for a cybersecurity event. Bad PLC code showed up as car crashes, the most honest feedback loop I've shipped.
+date: 2026-05-01
+projectPeriod: 'July-August 2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/city-simulation.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of a Unity traffic simulation.
+tags: ['simulation', 'systems']
+role: Simulation author
+stack: ['Unity', 'C#', 'REST API', 'Blender']
+outcome: Visible consequences for an otherwise abstract PLC challenge
+audience: technical
+links: []
+---
+
+Most security challenges punish wrong answers with a red "incorrect." This one punished them with car wrecks, and people learned faster. A PLC cybersecurity event in the summer of 2018 needed something visceral; I built a small Unity city where the traffic lights were driven by a REST API and contestants wrote the control logic.
+
+All decisions ran on the server and got broadcast to clients. The harder problem wasn't the simulation; it was making the broadcast fault-tolerant on conference Wi-Fi without flooding it. I built it solo, including the models and animations in Blender. Not a flex, just context for why everything's a little janky.
+
+There was also a HUD overlay for tweets. It felt clever at the time and dated horribly. Skip that part.

src/content/posts/declared-shared-simulation-code.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: One Game Library, Imported by Both the Client and the Server
+description: A mobile multiplayer browser game where client and server linked the same TypeScript module. One source of truth, one fewer class of bug.
+date: 2026-05-07
+projectPeriod: 'Autumn-Winter 2020'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/decla-red.jpg
+  alt: The decla.red browser game interface showing a space scene.
+tags: ['games', 'web', 'systems']
+role: Game and backend systems author
+stack: ['TypeScript', 'Node.js', 'WebSockets', 'Firebase', 'WebGL', 'SDF-2D']
+scale: Multiple game servers, each talking to 16–32 clients, browser and mobile
+outcome: A multiplayer browser game that proved SDF-2D survived a real game loop
+audience: technical
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/decla.red
+  - label: BSc thesis
+    url: /media/downloads/sdf2d-andras-schmelczer.pdf
+    download: true
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/decla-red.jpg
+    alt: The decla.red browser game interface showing a space scene with team controls and planets.
+    caption: A real game loop is a worse audience than a tech demo. That's the point.
+---
+
+My thesis was a renderer; proving it in a real multiplayer loop was the point. A real game loop is a worse audience than a tech demo. That's the point. So through autumn 2020 I built decla.red on top of [SDF-2D](/articles/sdf-2d-ray-tracing/): a conquest-style space shooter, two teams, small planets, ray-traced 2D rendering, browser and mobile. The architecture decision worth remembering came out of needing the server and the client to stop lying to each other: one TypeScript module containing the game rules, linked by both sides of the wire.
+
+## The split that usually goes wrong
+
+Real-time multiplayer has an awkward two-machine problem. The server has to be authoritative or the game is cheatable; the client has to feel immediate or the game is unplayable. If you write the rules twice, once on each side, they will drift. Eventually a player's screen will say one thing and the server will think another.
+
+I wanted the server's "compute the next state" function and the client's "predict the next state locally" function to be literally the same function. So I put the rules in a shared TypeScript library, published nothing, and had both `package.json` files link to it.
+
+The win wasn't elegance, it was the bugs that didn't happen. Client prediction stopped being an approximation of the server; it _was_ the server, run optimistically and reconciled when the authoritative update came back.
+
+## Other choices worth a sentence
+
+- **k-d trees for spatial queries.** Once the world held more than a few dozen objects, naive collision and proximity checks dominated the server tick. A k-d tree dropped them out of the profile.
+- **Message-passing object model.** Lifted from Smalltalk's `doesNotUnderstand:` idea. Entities respond to messages they care about and ignore the rest. Easier to extend than the inheritance tree I tried first, and less brittle.
+- **Firebase only for server discovery.** Not for game state, just for "which servers are currently in the pool." Tiny consistent store, didn't need to write one.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- **Observability for desync.** Multiplayer systems live or die by visibility into divergence. I had logs; I needed dashboards showing the rate, the shape, and the triggering interaction for every prediction miss. Without those, debugging was guessing.
+- **Don't tangle rendering and networking in the same tree.** Both were interesting, both put different kinds of pressure on the architecture, and the directories grew into each other. Separate top-level folders from day one next time.
+- **Skip multi-server until the math demands it.** I wired up multi-server early because it sounded right. With 16–32 clients per server I was nowhere near needing it; the complexity wasn't free.

src/content/posts/fizika-erettsegi-practice-app.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: A Physics Practice App for the Hungarian Érettségi
+description: A static jQuery site I built in high school to drill past exam questions. 659 questions, a decade of past papers, still online and still used.
+date: 2026-05-28
+projectPeriod: '2017-2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/fizika.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of the Fizika practice app showing topic-selection buttons over a light textured background.
+tags: ['web', 'tools']
+role: Question database, frontend, backend
+stack: ['jQuery', 'vanilla HTML/CSS', 'Node/Express', 'JSON', 'localStorage']
+outcome: A free practice app real students still find when they search for past érettségi physics papers
+audience: general
+links:
+  - label: Live
+    url: https://fizika.schmelczer.dev
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://home.schmelczer.dev/git/andras/fizika
+---
+
+I needed it. In my last year of high school I was about to sit the _emelt szintű_ (advanced-level) physics érettségi, and the practice material I could find online was either paywalled or scattered across PDFs that wouldn't tell you whether your answer was right. So one evening I started typing past exam questions into a JSON file. A few weeks later I had something resembling a study tool, and a few weeks after that I had 659 questions covering more than a decade of past papers.
+
+The site is intentionally small. A static frontend on jQuery, four CSS files, a JSON blob of questions, a folder of scanned diagrams from the original papers. You pick a topic (_Mechanika, Hőtan, Elektromosság, Atomfizika_) or hunt down a specific year's exam, get a randomised quiz, answer, and the page colours each row green or red. Past results sit in `localStorage`, because the audience was high schoolers; account-less was the privacy answer.
+
+It outgrew Firebase eventually. I moved the data to a small Express backend so I could keep editing questions without a paid plan, with a JSON file and an image folder as the storage layer. The admin routes have no auth; instead, the service stays off the public internet and I edit through an SSH-forwarded localhost. Fine for a one-person CMS, terrible advice for anything with multiple editors.
+
+What I'd change if I were starting it now:
+
+- **Astro instead of jQuery plus a Node server.** The whole thing could be one static site that re-renders on push. No backend, no CSP fiddling, no Docker.
+- **Markdown source, not a hand-edited JSON file.** Editing questions in JSON is fine until you forget a comma at 1am and the site stops loading.
+- **A real licence note on the question text.** The papers are public exam material, but it's worth saying so somewhere on the page.
+
+It's been online in some form for eight years. Every spring I get a few emails from students asking whether I'll add the latest year's paper. I usually do, eventually. The thing I made for myself in 2017 is still doing its job for someone else's last year of high school, and that's the only metric on it I actually care about.

src/content/posts/fleeting-garden-webgpu-drawing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+---
+title: A WebGPU Drawing Garden Where Agents Rewrite Your Strokes
+description: A single-file WebGPU drawing toy. You stroke a colour, agents follow it, and a 3×3 matrix per vibe gives each preset its personality.
+date: 2026-05-22
+projectPeriod: '2026'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/fleeting-garden.jpg
+  alt: A kaleidoscopic Fleeting Garden snapshot of cyan, violet, and yellow agent trails radiating from a central knot.
+iframeThumbnail: true
+tags: ['graphics', 'simulation', 'web']
+role: Graphics and shader author
+stack: ['TypeScript', 'WebGPU', 'WGSL', 'Compute shaders', 'Vite', 'Tweakpane']
+scale: One HTML file, ~10 WGSL shaders, 6 vibe presets, 60 FPS target on consumer hardware
+outcome: A browser drawing toy where user strokes seed an agent simulation that overwrites them
+audience: technical
+links:
+  - label: Demo
+    url: /fleeting/
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://home.schmelczer.dev/git/andras/webgpu
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/fleeting-garden.jpg
+    alt: Close-up of intertwining cyan, violet, and yellow agent trails radiating into a kaleidoscopic central knot.
+    caption: A snapshot from one session. What you see is the trail texture; the agents that drew it are already gone.
+---
+
+Nine numbers in `{-1, 0, 1}` arranged in a 3×3 matrix decide an entire vibe's personality. That constraint is what kept me up: proving simplicity can be expressive, that you don't need a behaviour function per preset. A WebGPU drawing toy where you stroke a colour, agents spawn along it, and the garden slowly overwrites the patch you laid down. One static HTML file, six compute stages, none of them skippable.
+
+## Why physarum needed a knob
+
+Physarum-style agent sims are everywhere and most of them stop being interesting after thirty seconds, because they converge to the same family of branching shapes no matter what you feed them. Seeding the initial condition isn't enough; the input has to keep being a force inside the loop, otherwise you're just watching the attractor settle.
+
+My second self-imposed constraint was that one engine had to produce six visibly different presets without forking. The first prototype had a `switch (preset)` with one behaviour function per vibe and it was already painful at vibe two. I needed the personality to live in data, not code.
+
+## The reaction matrix
+
+Each vibe is a 3×3 table of colour-to-colour affinities. When an agent of colour `i` looks at the trail in front of it, it weights the three channels of that sample by row `i` of the matrix, then uses the sign to pick left, right, or straight. That's it. The whole behaviour rule.
+
+Three examples of what nine numbers can do:
+
+- **Aurora Mycelium:** cyclic, each colour chases the next. Agents wind into ribbons.
+- **Velvet Observatory:** every off-diagonal entry negative. Colours repel into separate islands.
+- **Paper Lantern Fog:** matrix filled with ones. Colours collapse into one cooperative blob.
+
+Adding a tenth number to the matrix would tax every existing vibe. Tuning the nine I have is a text edit. Six presets in, I haven't extended it.
+
+## The compute work, broken into small jobs
+
+Six stages, ten WGSL files, each one short enough that I can hold it in my head when something breaks:
+
+1. **Agent step:** sample the trail at a sensor offset, pick a turn, move, deposit colour. ~300 lines, the longest one.
+2. **Diffusion:** blur and decay so old marks soften. The boring one, and the one you can't skip: without it, strokes stay forever and the garden collapses into noise.
+3. **Brush:** write user strokes into both the trail texture and a separate "source" texture the agents can read.
+4. **Eraser:** two variants: one clears a region of the trail, the other kills agents in a radius.
+5. **Agent generation:** spawn along strokes, resize the buffer when the cap changes, compact after erasure so dead slots don't waste GPU time.
+6. **Render:** read the trail, apply palette and grain.
+
+The bind-group setup overhead from running more pipelines was lost in the noise next to the simulation cost. The win was that when the eraser shader started killing the wrong agents, I opened one file and reasoned about it without touching anything else.
+
+## Smaller calls
+
+- **Adaptive cap, circular buffer.** If FPS drops, the cap shrinks; if there's headroom, it grows. When the cap is hit, new agents overwrite older ones. The decay you see, a stroke vanishing thirty seconds after you drew it, isn't an explicit eraser, it's the buffer wrapping around.
+- **URL is the share format.** The chosen vibe is in the query string. The "send your friend this preset" link is just a URL with `?vibe=tidepool-lantern` on it. The parser is tolerant about accents and casing because people retype these.
+- **One HTML file.** All CSS and JS inline. The piano samples sit beside it. Self-contained enough to email or drop on a USB stick.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- The intro animation (agents fly in to spell the title, then transition to steady state) couples three shaders through a single `progress: 0 → 1` value. It's the bit I'd least want to refactor today. Next time I'd model the intro as its own dispatch with its own buffer and hand off cleanly.
+- Mobile works, but the toolbar fights the canvas for screen and the agent cap has to shrink hard to keep frame time down. A proper fix means rethinking the toolbar and exposing the cap-vs-resolution tradeoff to the user.
+- The simulation has invariants that proptest would falsify in minutes: agent count under the cap, every stroke produces a positive-coloured deposit on the next frame, and the eraser doesn't leak agents past its radius. Snapshot tests aren't the right tool here.

src/content/posts/foreign-exchange-prediction-experiment.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: Predicting EUR/USD With Hanning Windows
+description: A weekend frequency-domain experiment that did a passable job on EUR/USD. I would not have trusted it with my money, and I didn't.
+date: 2026-05-03
+projectPeriod: 'Autumn 2019'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/forex.jpg
+  alt: Chart comparing predicted and actual EUR/USD exchange rates.
+tags: ['systems', 'tools']
+role: Experiment author
+stack: ['Python', 'NumPy', 'SciPy', 'Flask', 'MQL4']
+outcome: A prediction server, an MQL4 trading client, and a clearer view of how far my edge wasn't
+audience: technical
+links: []
+---
+
+In the autumn of 2019 I was an undergrad with a few weekends free and the quiet conviction that I could find a small edge on EUR/USD. The screenshots were flattering: the prediction (blue) hugged the actual rate (green) in a way that looked like skill. A linear regression in the frequency domain, dressed up. I did not trade real money with it, and that restraint is the only thing about the project that aged well.
+
+The pipeline:
+
+- Smooth the input series.
+- Differentiate.
+- Short-time Fourier transform with overlapped, Hanning-windowed frames.
+- Extrapolate the frequency-domain coefficients.
+- Invert everything back to a predicted price series.
+
+A Python server (NumPy, SciPy, Flask) ran the model. An MQL4 client on a broker terminal called the server and would have placed trades if I'd dared.
+
+What I actually learned: even a naive model can show a sometimes-profitable backtest, and that's the trap. The real game is built by people with co-located servers, microsecond ticks, and millions in infrastructure. This project taught me how far my edge wasn't.

src/content/posts/frame-eink-photo-display.md

@@ -2,43 +2,33 @@
 title: An E-Ink Photo Frame That Sleeps When the House Is Empty
 description: A Pi, a 6-colour e-ink panel, and a self-hosted Immich library. Photos picked by date and favourites, gated on Home Assistant presence, Atkinson-dithered.
 date: 2026-05-27
-period: '2026'
+projectPeriod: '2026'
 thumbnail:
   src: ./_assets/frame.jpg
   alt: The e-ink frame on the wall showing a dithered landscape scene with the capture age and EXIF location painted into the bottom corners.
+tags: ['embedded', 'systems', 'tools']
+role: Frame builder and pipeline author
+stack:
+  [
+    'Python',
+    'Raspberry Pi Zero 2W',
+    'Waveshare 7.3" 6-colour panel',
+    'Immich',
+    'Home Assistant',
+    'numba',
+    'Atkinson dither',
+  ]
+scale: One panel, one household, ~64 refreshes a day at peak
+outcome: A wall-mounted photo frame that pulls from self-hosted Immich, gated on home presence, with no cloud dependencies
+audience: general
 links:
   - label: Source
     url: https://home.schmelczer.dev/git/andras/frame
-article:
-  tags: ['embedded', 'systems', 'tools']
-  stack:
-    [
-      'Python',
-      'Raspberry Pi Zero 2W',
-      'Waveshare 7.3" 6-colour panel',
-      'Immich',
-      'Home Assistant',
-      'numba',
-      'Atkinson dither',
-    ]
-  scale: One panel, one household, ~64 refreshes a day at peak
-  media:
-    - type: image
-      src: ./_assets/frame.jpg
-      caption: The bottom corners carry the photo's age and EXIF location. Painted as text on top, so the dither can't smear them.
-project:
-  title: Frame
-  selected: true
-  technologies:
-    [
-      'Python',
-      'Raspberry Pi Zero 2W',
-      'Waveshare PhotoPainter',
-      'Immich',
-      'Home Assistant',
-      'numba',
-      'Atkinson dither',
-    ]
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/frame.jpg
+    alt: The frame on the wall showing a 6-colour Atkinson-dithered landscape scene, with "2 years ago" and a location label painted into the bottom corners.
+    caption: The bottom corners carry the photo's age and EXIF location. Painted as text on top, so the dither can't smear them.
 ---
 
 In 2024, researchers found family-blog photos of Brazilian children inside the LAION training set. Self-hosting your photos used to be a preference; it's a safeguarding decision now. Nixplay's cloud-tied frames have bricked. Funimation deleted libraries people had paid for. I wanted a photo frame on the hallway wall, and I wasn't going to hand the family album to a vendor who could close the doors on it.
@@ -47,7 +37,7 @@ So it's a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W driving Waveshare's [PhotoPainter](https://www.wa
 
 ## Why a stupid amount of engineering for a picture on a wall
 
-Because the engineering is how you end up caring about the object. Albert Borgmann distinguished _devices_, which efficiently deliver a commodity and disappear into the wall, from _focal things_, which gather a practice around them. A Nest Hub is a device; it shows you photos the way a microwave delivers heat. The frame became a focal thing somewhere along the way: I curated the weights, hung it where the light is right, and still tweak it when something feels off. It doesn't sell my attention back to me; it asks me to pay some.
+That's the point. Albert Borgmann once distinguished _devices_ (which efficiently deliver a commodity and disappear into the wall) from _focal things_, which gather a practice around them. A Nest Hub is a device; it shows you photos the way a microwave delivers heat. The frame is a focal thing. I curated the weights. I hung it where the light was right. I tweak it when something feels off. It doesn't sell my attention back to me; it asks me to pay some.
 
 The medium helps. E-ink doesn't glow and doesn't beep. From across the room it reads as _image_, not as _screen_, and that one perceptual difference changes how often I actually look at it.
 
@@ -55,7 +45,7 @@ The medium helps. E-ink doesn't glow and doesn't beep. From across the room it r
 
 The cron line does most of the work. Every 15 minutes, the script checks the time of day, then asks Home Assistant whether anyone in `HA_PRESENCE` is home. If not, it quits. The panel keeps showing the last photo, because e-ink, so you walk in to whatever was there when the house emptied.
 
-This was never about power saving. John Berger drew a line between photographs kept inside a context of lived meaning (private) and ones severed from it and circulated (public), and Google Photos hands you the public mode dressed as the private one. A wall in the hallway, refreshed only while your people are home, restores some of the context. The same photograph means something different surfacing while you're cooking dinner than it does in a feed at 11pm.
+The point isn't power saving. John Berger drew a line between photographs kept inside a context of lived meaning (private), and ones severed and circulated (public). Google Photos hands you the public mode dressed as the private. A wall in the hallway, lit only when your people are home, restores the context. The same photograph means something different surfacing while you're cooking dinner than it does in a feed at 11pm.
 
 ## How a photo gets picked
 
@@ -78,8 +68,6 @@ Hundred Rabbits, a couple who live offshore on a sailboat doing permacomputing i
 ## Smaller calls
 
 - **Capture age and EXIF location painted as text.** White on a black stroke, written _after_ dithering, so the labels stay sharp on the 6-colour palette.
-- **A lock file, because refreshes take a while.** A render can run past 12 seconds; `flock` on a lock file makes an overlapping cron tick exit quietly instead of fighting the panel.
-- **When every candidate fails the head check,** the picker quietly falls back to photos it has shown before. A repeat on the wall beats a sliced face.
 - **Swap masked, journald volatile.** The SD card is the most likely thing to die on this build. Don't write to it unless you have to.
 - **Wifi power-save reconnect job.** The Pi Zero 2W's wifi drops if power-save kicks in. A separate `wifi-check.sh` every five minutes brings it back.
 
@@ -89,4 +77,4 @@ Hundred Rabbits, a couple who live offshore on a sailboat doing permacomputing i
 - **A bigger panel and a small light.** The [Inky Impression](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression) 13" with a custom frame and integrated lighting would help most in the evenings, when the e-ink reads muddled under warm lamps.
 - **A daytime cadence curve.** 15 minutes is constant. It should slow at night and speed up around the times we're actually in the hallway.
 
-The frame is small, slow, and almost entirely silent. It does one thing for one household and reports to no one. I'd like more of my software to be like that.
+The frame is small, slow, and almost entirely silent. It does one thing for one household and doesn't tell anyone about it. The smallness is the point. There should be more of this kind of thing.

src/content/posts/graph-editor-javafx-simulation-input.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+title: A JavaFX Editor for the Cooling Simulator
+description: Companion editor for the cooling-system sim. Drag-and-drop graph layout, JSON export, upload-to-backend. Small tool, mattered more than I expected.
+date: 2026-04-25
+projectPeriod: 'October-November 2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/process-simulator-input.jpg
+  alt: JavaFX graph editor for the cooling system simulator.
+tags: ['simulation', 'tools']
+role: Editor author
+stack: ['JavaFX', 'JSON', 'REST API']
+outcome: A drag-and-drop graph editor that let non-developers feed the simulator
+audience: technical
+links: []
+---
+
+Non-technical event organisers needed to rewire a cooling plant in real time without me hovering. That was the brief, and it ruled out every interface I'd have enjoyed writing. The [cooling system sim](/articles/nuclear-cooling-simulation/) was only as useful as the tool that fed it, so in late 2018 I built a JavaFX desktop editor: lay out the plant as a graph, edit each element's parameters in a side panel, export JSON, or upload straight to the backend.
+
+Small tool, and the whole event hinged on it. If I built it again I'd skip JavaFX and put the editor in the browser next to the monitoring clients. One install fewer for everyone, and one fewer reason for someone to call me over.

src/content/posts/greatai-ai-deployment-api.md

@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+---
+title: A Python Framework Where Doing the Right Thing Is the Default
+description: My MSc thesis. 33 catalogued ML deployment habits, a decorator-shaped Python API, and a survey of working engineers on which actually got adopted.
+date: 2026-05-09
+projectPeriod: '2022'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/great-ai.png
+  alt: Example Python code using the GreatAI API.
+tags: ['ai', 'systems', 'tools']
+featuredOrder: 1
+role: Researcher and framework author
+stack: ['Python', 'decorators', 'FastAPI', 'survey design']
+scale: 33 deployment habits surveyed, 6 proposed additions, framework evaluated by working data scientists and engineers
+outcome: A pip-installable framework, an MSc thesis, and one strong opinion about API surface area
+audience: recruiter-relevant
+links:
+  - label: PyPI
+    url: https://pypi.org/project/great-ai/
+  - label: Project site
+    url: https://great-ai.scoutinscience.com
+  - label: MSc thesis
+    url: /media/downloads/great-ai-andras-schmelczer.pdf
+    download: true
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/great-ai.png
+    alt: Example Python code using GreatAI decorators and prediction helpers.
+    caption: A working GreatAI service is about ten lines on top of a plain prediction function.
+---
+
+By the end of 2021 I had stopped believing the people skipping ML deployment best practices were the problem. They knew the list. They agreed with the list. They had a deadline, and every item on the list cost five lines of glue. My MSc thesis turned that into the actual research question: not "what should engineers do" but "what API shape makes doing the right thing cheaper than not." The framework that fell out, `great-ai`, is a decorator on a plain Python function. The thesis behind it is the part worth reading.
+
+## The thing nobody wants to admit
+
+The literature has a long list of habits you should adopt when shipping an ML service: track inputs, version models, expose health, log decisions, keep predictions reproducible. Everyone agrees with the list. Almost nobody implements all of it.
+
+I spent the bulk of the thesis catalogueing 33 such habits, proposing 6 more, and surveying engineers on which actually got applied in their day jobs. The data was pretty clear about the failure mode: it wasn't ignorance, it wasn't laziness, it wasn't budget. It was that the cost of doing the right thing, five lines of glue per habit multiplied across a stack, was higher than the visible cost of skipping it. So skipping it became the default.
+
+So the real research question wasn't "what should engineers do." It was "what API shape makes doing the right thing cheaper than not."
+
+## The framework's bet
+
+- **A decorator on a plain function.** `@GreatAI.create` turns a regular Python function into a deployed service with metadata, request tracing, and a versioned interface. No inheritance, no project layout, no enforced directory structure. The mental cost is one import.
+- **Implicit behaviour only for cross-cutting concerns.** Logging, versioning, metadata are implicit. Anything touching business logic stays explicit. The rule: if it would surprise me when I'm debugging, it shouldn't be implicit.
+- **Own the contract, leave the storage alone.** Where you persist logs, models, or metrics is your choice; GreatAI defines the shape and provides defaults. The model registry stays somebody else's library.
+
+The survey backed up the central premise: ease of use and functionality both matter for adoption, and they're independent axes. A framework that ticks every box and is awkward will lose to a smaller one that doesn't.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- I'd narrow further. Anything GreatAI did that overlapped with MLflow, BentoML, or modern observability stacks would go. The durable bit was always the decorator and the catalogue behind it.
+- I'd publish the survey instrument separately. The 33-habit catalogue and the adoption-vs-impact methodology outlive the framework. People still ask about that part.
+- I'd stop calling them "best practices." I used that phrase in the thesis and it aged into corporate-speak. The honest name is "things that hurt later if you skip them."

src/content/posts/life-towers-immutable-tries.md

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+---
+title: Syncing State with an Immutable Trie
+description: 'A visual goal tracker whose lasting idea was the sync model: an immutable trie so structural diffs are trivial and only deltas cross the wire.'
+date: 2026-05-05
+projectPeriod: 'August-September 2019'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/towers.jpg
+  alt: Life Towers goal tracking interface with tower-like visual structures.
+tags: ['systems', 'web', 'tools']
+featuredOrder: 4
+role: Full-stack author
+stack: ['Python', 'Angular', 'TypeScript', 'Custom sync protocol']
+scale: Multi-device goal and task state shared between clients and a server
+outcome: A working sync protocol where structural sharing made the delta tiny
+audience: recruiter-relevant
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/life-towers/
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/towers.jpg
+    alt: Screenshot of a life tracking web interface represented with tower-like visual structures.
+    caption: The interface was a 2019 weekend experiment. The trie underneath aged better.
+---
+
+In August 2019 I wanted a goal tracker I'd actually open, on whichever device was nearest, without watching it disagree with itself. Nothing off the shelf fit, so I built one over a couple of weekends. The tower metaphor was the part friends saw; the part that aged well was the sync model that fell out of needing the same state in three places at once.
+
+## The problem in one paragraph
+
+Pick any non-trivial mutable object graph, sync it across devices, and you end up either sending the whole thing on every change (wasteful) or writing ad-hoc diff logic per shape (brittle). I wanted a representation where the _shape_ of the data made the diff fall out for free.
+
+## The trie, concretely
+
+A goal in Life Towers is a path of strings. `Health / Running / 5k`. Tasks under a goal hang off the leaf. A user's whole state is a tree, and a trie is exactly the data structure that makes that tree's _identity_ manipulable.
+
+Two properties did the heavy lifting:
+
+- **Structural sharing.** When you tick off a task under `Health / Running / 5k`, the new root reuses every untouched subtree by reference. The `Career` branch and the `Reading` branch are the same objects they were before. Comparing the old and new roots is mostly pointer equality; only the path that actually changed gets walked.
+- **Immutability.** Updates produce new structure instead of mutating. "Where I was" and "where I am" become two pointers, not two snapshots. The diff between them is whatever's not shared, and that walk is O(changes), not O(state).
+
+The sync loop falls out:
+
+1. Client holds the last root the server acknowledged plus its own current root.
+2. To send: walk only the unshared paths, emit one op per changed leaf. In practice that's a handful of bytes for a typical edit, no matter how large the rest of the tree is.
+3. Server applies, returns its new root.
+4. Client rebases any in-flight edits by replaying them on top.
+
+There's no conflict resolution layer because the operations commute on the structure. Two clients adding tasks under different branches produce non-overlapping deltas that compose trivially. The hard cases (two clients editing the same leaf) are tiny and obvious, because they're the _only_ place the deltas touch the same path.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- **Property tests around the rebase.** The reconcile path is exactly where a generator finds bugs that hand-written tests never think to write. I had hand-written cases; I'd start with `proptest` now.
+- **A standalone spec for the wire format.** The part worth lifting out was the protocol, not the goal tracker. A short spec would let me (or anyone) reimplement it in a different stack without re-deriving everything from the Python source.
+- **Strip the visual experiment.** The tower visualisation was fun but it bound the storage to a UI metaphor. The sync model should be a library; the towers should be a separate toy.
+
+## If you take one idea from this
+
+Most sync problems are diff problems pretending to be transport problems. Pick the data structure that makes the diff free, and the protocol almost writes itself. The corollary: if you're writing a lot of "if this changed, send that" code, you're using the wrong structure.

src/content/posts/lights-synchronized-to-music.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: 'My First Real Project: LEDs Driven by an FFT'
+description: A Raspberry Pi music player that drove RGB strips through MOSFETs. The first thing I started and actually finished.
+date: 2026-04-26
+projectPeriod: 'Spring 2016'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/leds.jpg
+  alt: RGB LED strips lit by a music synchronisation project.
+tags: ['systems', 'tools']
+role: Hardware and software author
+stack: ['Python', 'NumPy', 'FFT', 'Raspberry Pi', 'MOSFETs', 'vanilla web']
+outcome: The first non-trivial project I started and finished
+audience: technical
+links: []
+---
+
+Spring 2016. I had a Raspberry Pi, a couple of 12V RGB LED strips someone had given me, a handful of MOSFETs from an electronics kit, and zero idea what I was doing. I wired one of the MOSFETs backwards and it got hot enough to leave a small mark on the breadboard. I learned to read a datasheet, slowly, by needing one. This was the first thing I started and actually finished.
+
+The plan was something like: play music, look at it, make the lights match. I got bands wrong first. Mapping raw audio amplitude to brightness made the lights pulse with anything (clipping, voice, fan noise), a strobing mess that hurt to look at. Reading about Fourier transforms long enough to type `numpy.fft.fft(audio_chunk)` into a REPL was the moment the project started actually behaving like the thing I'd imagined. Bass-heavy frequency bins went to red; mids to green; highs to blue. Smoothing the output over a few frames stopped the seizure-inducing flicker.
+
+The frontend was a vanilla web page on the same Pi: pick a track, tweak the band thresholds, see what changed. No framework. Just a `<select>`, a few sliders, and an `XMLHttpRequest`. It worked.
+
+It's not impressive in 2026. The thing I actually keep from it isn't the FFT or the MOSFETs; it's the discovery that I'd rather have a finished janky thing than an elegant unfinished one. Most of the projects on this site are downstream of that discovery; [the ATtiny85 handheld](/articles/ad-astra-attiny85-game-engine/) four years later is the same instinct with the soldering iron held steadier. I'd still recommend the same path to anyone learning: pick something physical, plug things together until they work, accept that the first version will be ugly.

src/content/posts/my-notes-android-markdown-app.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: 'My Notes: A Markdown App for Android'
+description: A small Android note app built on Markwon. The idea wasn't new; the point was learning a platform that wasn't the web.
+date: 2026-05-02
+projectPeriod: 'November 2019'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/my-notes.png
+  alt: Screenshots of the My Notes Android app.
+tags: ['tools']
+role: Android app author
+stack: ['Android', 'Markdown', 'Markwon']
+outcome: A working notes app and my first time outside the web stack
+audience: technical
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/my-notes
+---
+
+In November 2019 I wrote my own notes app for Android, used it daily for a while, and then it lost a long battle with Obsidian. The loss was the lesson: I learned what I actually wanted from a notes app by watching mine fail to be it. Years later that same itch is why I wrote [reconcile-text](/articles/reconcile-text-3-way-merge/); by then I was editing the same notes in Vim, VS Code, and Obsidian, and nothing existed to merge three independently-edited copies back into one.
+
+The app itself was small: Markdown notes, hashtag filtering, Markwon for rendering. Every developer writes their own notes app eventually and the bar for shipping one isn't high. What I actually wanted was a few weeks outside the web stack, somewhere with different conventions about lifecycle, storage, and resource constraints. Android delivered that. I'd still recommend "write a small thing on a new platform" as a way to recalibrate what you take for granted.

src/content/posts/nuclear-cooling-simulation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+---
+title: 'Two Graphs Are Simpler Than One: A Cooling System Simulator'
+description: Live cooling-system sim for a PLC cybersecurity event. Splitting flow and heat into two graph passes kept it cheap and the behaviour believable.
+date: 2026-05-04
+projectPeriod: 'October-November 2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/process-simulator.jpg
+  alt: Cooling system simulator interface with pipes, pumps, and temperature values.
+tags: ['simulation', 'systems', 'tools']
+featuredOrder: 5
+role: Simulation and UI author
+stack: ['Python', 'Flask', 'NumPy', 'HTML canvas', 'JavaFX']
+scale: One remote sim server, many monitoring clients, separate JavaFX graph editor
+outcome: A believable PLC simulation usable by non-specialists during a live cybersecurity challenge
+audience: recruiter-relevant
+links: []
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/process-simulator.jpg
+    alt: Screenshot of the cooling system simulator with pipes, pumps, coolers, and temperature values.
+    caption: Flow ran first as a graph traversal, then heat solved as a matrix equation.
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/process-simulator-input.jpg
+    alt: Screenshot of the JavaFX graph editor used to define simulator input.
+    caption: The JavaFX editor produced JSON that the simulator ate as input.
+---
+
+Trying to solve flow and heat as a coupled system would have been a real CFD problem and I had two weeks. A cybersecurity event in late 2018 needed a cooling-system simulator that contestants could poke at through PLCs over a weekend, and the deadline shaped every decision after it: cheap to compute, plausible to a non-specialist, runs all weekend on one server. The useful design move was modelling flow and heat as **two separate graph passes**, not one combined PDE.
+
+## What the event needed
+
+The challenge was about PLCs. Contestants would change setpoints, valves, or pump speeds, and we needed them to see whether their action made the plant stable, wasted coolant, or melted something. That meant:
+
+- Multiple monitoring clients had to update from one simulation server in near real time.
+- The system had to be configurable enough that the event organisers could ship me a new plant on Friday night and have it running Saturday morning.
+- It had to be obvious. A simulator nobody understands isn't a teaching tool, it's noise.
+
+## The split that made it cheap
+
+Instead of the coupled solver:
+
+1. **Flow first, as graph traversal.** Walk the pipe graph from the pumps, accumulate pressure, distribute water to nodes.
+2. **Heat second, as a linear system.** Build the adjacency matrix from the flow result, add boundary conditions (heaters, exchangers, base temperatures), solve for node temperatures with NumPy.
+3. Repeat both passes per tick.
+
+This is wrong as physics. It's right as a model. Flow doesn't react to instantaneous heat in any way contestants could perceive, and the cost of solving them separately was a tiny fraction of solving them together. The clean phase boundary also meant when "the heat is weird," I knew exactly which pass to look at.
+
+## Why the editor mattered
+
+The simulator's most-used UI was the _input_ editor, a separate JavaFX tool where you laid out the plant, set parameters per element, and exported JSON the sim ate. I wrote up the editor's [own story here](/articles/graph-editor-javafx-simulation-input/), because in hindsight it deserved to be its own project.
+
+The lesson: a simulation is only as useful as its input pipeline. If editing the plant requires editing source, organisers won't use it.
+
+## What I'd change
+
+- **State what the model claims.** A convincing sim needs an honest README about what it does and doesn't model. Mine didn't. Anyone who took the numbers seriously could have walked away believing more than the model deserved.
+- **Recorded scenarios as regression tests.** Sim projects drift in ways that look plausible on screen. Storing "this input over 60 seconds produces these outputs" would have caught me when I broke the temperature solver on Saturday morning at the event.
+- **Skip JavaFX.** Cross-platform packaging was painful and the desktop dependency made the editor harder to hand off than it should have been. A web-based editor in the same browser the monitors used would have meant one fewer install for the organisers.

src/content/posts/perfect-postcode-rust-property-server.md

@@ -2,46 +2,46 @@
 title: 25 Million UK Property Rows in a Single Rust Process
 description: Notes on perfect-postcode.co.uk. Every numeric feature is u16-quantised in a row-major array, so filter eval is two integer compares per row.
 date: 2026-05-28
-period: '2026'
+projectPeriod: '2026'
 thumbnail:
   src: ./_assets/perfect-postcode.jpg
   alt: The Perfect Postcode dashboard with active filters on property type, price, transit time, and crime, showing a Manchester map with matching properties highlighted as a heatmap.
+tags: ['systems', 'web', 'tools']
+role: Server architect and operator
+stack:
+  [
+    'Rust',
+    'Axum',
+    'Polars',
+    'h3o',
+    'rayon',
+    'PocketBase',
+    'PMTiles',
+    'MapLibre',
+    'deck.gl',
+    'Conveyal R5',
+    'Gemini',
+  ]
+scale: ~25M historical properties, ~2.5M postcodes, ~150 numeric features per row, all in RAM on a single VM
+outcome: A single-binary UK property-intelligence service with sub-100ms hexagon aggregations under filter
+audience: technical
 links:
   - label: Site
     url: https://perfect-postcode.co.uk
-article:
-  tags: ['systems', 'web', 'tools']
-  stack:
-    [
-      'Rust',
-      'Axum',
-      'Polars',
-      'h3o',
-      'rayon',
-      'PocketBase',
-      'PMTiles',
-      'MapLibre',
-      'deck.gl',
-      'Conveyal R5',
-      'Gemini',
-    ]
-  scale: ~25M historical properties, ~2.5M postcodes, ~150 numeric features per row, all in RAM on a single VM
-  media:
-    - type: image
-      src: ./_assets/perfect-postcode.jpg
-      caption: A normal user pan triggers a hexagon aggregation under filter. The hot path holds itself to three integer compares per row.
-project:
-  title: Perfect Postcode
-  selected: true
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/perfect-postcode.jpg
+    alt: A Perfect Postcode dashboard view of Manchester with five active filters (property type, price, public-transport time to Manchester city centre, crime, noise) and a hex heatmap of 1,247 matching properties.
+    caption: A normal user pan triggers a hexagon aggregation under filter. The hot path holds itself to two u16 compares per row.
 ---
 
-A user told me the map felt sluggish when they dragged it across Manchester with four filters on. They were right, and it stung, because the previous version round-tripped to a database, decoded floats, and had spent its entire latency budget before it finished evaluating the first filter. The rewrite is one Rust binary that holds the entire UK property history in RAM and treats every filter as three integer compares. Everything else in this post follows from refusing to let that sluggishness come back.
+A user told me the map felt sluggish when they dragged it across Manchester with four filters on. They were right. The previous version round-tripped to a database, decoded floats, and lost the budget for a single pan inside the first filter. The rewrite is one Rust binary that holds the entire UK property history in RAM and treats every filter as three integer compares. Everything else in this post is the consequence of refusing to break that latency again.
 
 ## The constraint that shapes everything
 
 The answer to _"what's the median price in this hexagon, filtered to four-bedroom terraces under £450k with a 35-minute transit to Manchester"_ needs to come back inside a single map pan. Per visible cell, per request, every time the user moves anything. That's the work.
 
-At the resolution we want, the inputs are roughly 25M historical transactions, each with around 150 numeric features (price, EPC, deprivation deciles, school catchment metrics, POI proximities, noise, crime, …). Naively f32 per cell, that's ~15 GB before you count anything else: postcodes, POIs, places, tiles, travel times. I decided early that all of it would live in one process on one rentable box, and the rest of the architecture is what that decision demanded.
+At the resolution we want, the inputs are roughly 25M historical transactions, each with around 150 numeric features (price, EPC, deprivation deciles, school catchment metrics, POI proximities, noise, crime, …). Naively f32 per cell, that's ~15 GB before you count anything else: postcodes, POIs, places, tiles, travel times. The rest of the architecture is the consequence of insisting it all lives in one process on one rentable box.
 
 ## u16 quantisation in a row-major flat array
 
@@ -81,7 +81,7 @@ A small per-thread `FxHashMap<u64, u64>` H3 cache inside each rayon chunk takes
 
 `AppState` is large and immutable after the boot-time loads. `SharedState = RwLock<Arc<AppState>>` wraps it; every handler does `shared.load_state()`: a brief read lock, an `Arc::clone`, no further lock contention for the request.
 
-The standard read-mostly pattern, and I mention it for one reason: it makes hot-reloading the parquet trivial later. Build a new `AppState` from disk, take the write lock, swap the `Arc`, drop the old one when the last in-flight request finishes. None of the handlers need to change.
+The standard read-mostly pattern, but worth naming for one reason: it makes hot-reloading the parquet trivial later. Build a new `AppState` from disk, take the write lock, swap the `Arc`, drop the old one when the last in-flight request finishes. None of the handlers need to change.
 
 On top of that there's a per-endpoint `ConcurrencyLimitLayer::new(N)`. The expensive endpoints (filter-counts, hexagon-stats, screenshot, export) get 3–5; the cheap ones get 20–30. It is the simplest backpressure you can write and it does most of the work.
 
@@ -102,8 +102,8 @@ On top: a per-week token budget (`AI_FILTERS_WEEKLY_TOKEN_LIMIT = 10_000_000`) a
 
 ## Smaller calls
 
-- **jemalloc, tuned to give memory back.** glibc's malloc parks freed memory in per-CPU arenas and rarely returns it, so a Polars parquet scan leaves a high-water mark in RSS forever. The binary ships jemalloc with one-second decay (`dirty_decay_ms:1000,muzzy_decay_ms:1000`), a background thread purging every 10 seconds, and a synchronous arena purge after each big load. (I considered `mlockall` to pin the hot data instead; a comment in the code records why not: locking every freed-but-dirty page resident would have inflated ~10 GB of RSS into ~40.)
-- **Camera bounds from the 5th–95th percentile.** When the AI filter returns matches, the map frames the middle 90% of them per axis rather than the true bounding box, so one stray property in Cornwall can't zoom the camera out to all of England.
+- **`mlockall(MCL_CURRENT | MCL_FUTURE)` at startup.** The hot dataset has to never page out. With `CAP_IPC_LOCK` it works; without it we log and continue.
+- **`malloc_trim(0)` after each big load.** Polars leaves a high allocator water-mark after parquet scans. Trimming after each major load gives back hundreds of MB of RSS before steady state.
 - **Prometheus path normalisation.** `/api/tiles/5/16/10` becomes `/api/tiles/:z/:x/:y` before it becomes a label. Otherwise `/.env`, `/wp-admin/...`, and bot scans explode cardinality.
 - **Median-half eviction over LRU.** Token, share-bounds, and superuser-token caches evict the older half on overflow instead of one entry at a time. Cheap, and it spreads the re-validation cost instead of triggering a thundering herd.
 - **`spawn_blocking` for Polars I/O.** Parquet scans are CPU-bound. They block the tokio executor if you let them; they don't if you don't.
@@ -114,6 +114,7 @@ On top: a per-week token budget (`AI_FILTERS_WEEKLY_TOKEN_LIMIT = 10_000_000`) a
 
 ## What I'd change
 
+- **Pin the allocator.** I rely on `malloc_trim` to keep RSS predictable. A jemalloc with explicit purge would behave better than glibc plus periodic trimming, especially under sustained load.
 - **One bench for the hot loop.** I trust the structure but I have no number for _filter throughput per row per filter under typical load_. That number would tell me when the u16 trick stops being enough.
 - **Move free-zone bounds to PocketBase.** `FREE_ZONE_BOUNDS` is a `const`. It's been right for the demo region for a year. The next time it changes I'll regret hardcoding it.
 - **A typed query DSL instead of `;;`-separated strings.** The current filter wire format is `name:min:max;;name:val1|val2`. Cheap to parse, awful to evolve. A small JSON envelope would survive the next feature.

src/content/posts/photo-colour-grader.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: A Colour Grader Where Distance Was the Whole Idea
+description: Pick a colour, transform every nearby colour as a function of distance. A proof-of-concept grader I built to try one interaction idea.
+date: 2026-04-30
+projectPeriod: 'June 2018'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/photo-colour-grader.jpg
+  alt: Colour grading interface with tonal controls and an edited preview.
+tags: ['graphics', 'web', 'tools']
+role: Interface and image processing author
+stack: ['JavaScript', 'Canvas', 'Image processing']
+outcome: A working proof-of-concept grader and an interaction model I'd still defend
+audience: technical
+links: []
+---
+
+In June 2018 I got tired of every grader I tried making me think in masks. I wanted to point at "this orange" in a photo from one of my [walks](/articles/photo-site-generator/), nudge it, and have the neighbouring reds and yellows come along by however much made sense. Distance in colour space, not a brush. So I built the proof.
+
+The UI was a colour wheel where you'd click to drop a marker, drag to move it, click anywhere to add another. Each marker had its own settings; transformations fell off smoothly with distance from the picked colour. No masks, ever.
+
+I never built it into a real tool. The idea still feels right: distance in colour space is the natural unit for prose-style editing of an image. If I returned to it, I'd reach for WebGL instead of canvas. The interaction only earns its keep if the preview is live on a real photo, and canvas couldn't get there.

src/content/posts/photo-site-generator.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: A Photo Site That Generated Itself From a Folder
+description: A Webpack script that turns a folder of photos into a static site with responsive image variants. Mostly here as an excuse to talk about walks.
+date: 2026-04-27
+projectPeriod: 'Summer 2016'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/photos.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of a generated photography site.
+tags: ['web', 'tools']
+role: Site generator author
+stack: ['Webpack', 'Image processing', 'Static site generation']
+outcome: A photography site that updated itself when I dropped new images into a folder
+audience: general
+links: []
+---
+
+I take walks with a camera. Most of what I shoot isn't good, but the act of walking slowly with a frame to think about is the most reliable way I know to come back with an idea for whatever I'm working on. In the summer of 2016 I wanted somewhere to put the few frames that survived, and I wasn't going to maintain a CMS for it.
+
+So a Webpack script: point it at a directory of full-size photos, get a static site with responsive variants per image. Drop in a new photo, run the build, deploy. The pipeline mattered less than making the habit visible. The same habit later produced a [colour grader](/articles/photo-colour-grader/) for the same shots.
+
+If I rebuilt it today I'd use Astro, which is what this site runs on.

src/content/posts/platform-game-c-sdl.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: A 3D Voxel Game in C, Built While Learning Pointers
+description: My Basics of Programming project. 3D platformer in C with SDL 1.2, destructible terrain, time-slowdown powerups, and a great many segmentation faults.
+date: 2026-04-28
+projectPeriod: 'Autumn 2017'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/platform-game.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot from a 3D platform game written in C.
+tags: ['games', 'systems']
+role: Game author
+stack: ['C', 'SDL 1.2', 'Voxel terrain']
+outcome: A playable course project, and the moment programming clicked
+audience: technical
+---
+
+Autumn 2017, Basics of Programming, a deadline that forced me to learn C the hard way. I'd write almost none of it the same way today, and I'd defend every choice in it anyway. A 3D voxel platformer in pure C with SDL 1.2. No engine, no scripting layer.
+
+Maps were randomly generated and destructible voxel by voxel, so the player could dig their way out of trouble or wall off flying enemies that merged into larger ones as they got closer. Powerups let you shoot, or slow down time at the cost of points.
+
+What I actually learned was pointers, painfully, through an adequate number of segfaults. The course was meant to teach the basics of programming; for me it was the moment programming stopped feeling like a list of facts and started feeling like a thing I could build with. The next time I reached for C it was on hardware that punished waste; see [Ad Astra](/articles/ad-astra-attiny85-game-engine/).
+
+First-project privilege.

src/content/posts/reconcile-text-3-way-merge.md

@@ -2,34 +2,33 @@
 title: A 3-Way Text Merger That Never Shows Conflict Markers
 description: reconcile-text merges Markdown notes from three editors I don't control, with no history. Why git, CRDTs, and diff-match-patch each failed me.
 date: 2026-05-21
-period: '2025'
+projectPeriod: '2025'
 thumbnail:
   src: ./_assets/reconcile.png
   alt: The reconcile-text logo and tagline "Conflict-free 3-way text merging".
+tags: ['systems', 'tools', 'web']
+featuredOrder: 2
+role: Library author
+stack: ['Rust', 'WebAssembly', 'Python', 'pyo3', 'wasm-bindgen']
+scale: One Rust core, three published packages (crates.io, npm, PyPI), driving an Obsidian sync plugin
+outcome: A small Rust library that auto-resolves prose conflicts, with WASM and Python bindings
+audience: recruiter-relevant
 links:
   - label: Demo
     url: /reconcile/
   - label: Source
-    url: https://git.schmelczer.dev/andras/reconcile
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/reconcile
   - label: crates.io
     url: https://crates.io/crates/reconcile-text
   - label: npm
     url: https://www.npmjs.com/package/reconcile-text
   - label: PyPI
     url: https://pypi.org/project/reconcile-text/
-article:
-  featuredOrder: 2
-  tags: ['systems', 'tools', 'web']
-  stack: ['Rust', 'WebAssembly', 'Python', 'pyo3', 'wasm-bindgen']
-  scale: One Rust core, three published packages (crates.io, npm, PyPI), driving an Obsidian sync plugin
-  media:
-    - type: image
-      src: ./_assets/reconcile.png
-      caption: reconcile-text weaves conflicting edits together instead of asking a human to choose.
-project:
-  title: reconcile-text
-  selected: true
-  technologies: ['Rust', 'WebAssembly', 'Python', 'pyo3', 'wasm-bindgen', 'Myers diff']
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/reconcile.png
+    alt: The reconcile-text logo, a stylised merge arrow, with the tagline "Conflict-free 3-way text merging".
+    caption: reconcile-text weaves conflicting edits together instead of asking a human to choose.
 ---
 
 ## Why I wrote it
@@ -44,25 +43,25 @@ Every existing tool got close and missed:
 
 So the library does exactly one thing: pure function from three strings to one. No async, no networking, no concurrency, no plugins. Anything outside that boundary is somebody else's library.
 
-## The decisions that mattered
+## The decisions worth naming
 
 **Myers diff per side, then weave the diffs.** Each child is diffed against the parent, the two edit scripts are optimised so adjacent changes group cleanly, then a single weaving pass interleaves them into one ordered op sequence that produces the merged text. The weave borrows the shape of operational transformation, but the inputs are batched complete diffs, not live keystrokes, so it only runs once per merge.
 
-**Tokeniser is the user knob.** Of everything in the library, this is the choice I'd argue for longest. Most of what people want when they say "merge differently" isn't a new algorithm; it's a different unit. Word-level tokenisation turns most "conflicts" in prose into two adjacent edits that coexist. Line-level makes it behave like `git merge-file`. Markdown-level merges on headings and list items. Same engine, four different products depending on what you call a token.
+**Tokeniser is the user knob.** This is the choice I'd defend hardest. Most of what people want when they say "merge differently" isn't a new algorithm; it's a different unit. Word-level tokenisation turns most "conflicts" in prose into two adjacent edits that coexist. Line-level makes it behave like `git merge-file`. Markdown-level merges on headings and list items. Same engine, four different products depending on what you call a token.
 
-**Cursors are first-class merge inputs.** Each cursor has a stable ID and rides through the merge, so a collaborative editor can ask "where did this cursor go?" without reconstructing it from the output text. The test fixtures mark cursor positions with a `|` straight in the YAML, which keeps these cases readable enough that I actually write them. Cursor support is the bit that made the library useful to anything that wasn't just [the Obsidian sync plugin I wrote alongside it](/articles/vault-link-obsidian-sync/).
+**Cursors are first-class merge inputs.** Each cursor has a stable ID and rides through the merge so a collaborative editor can ask "where did this cursor go?" without reconstructing it from the output text. This is the bit that made it useful to anything that wasn't just [the Obsidian sync plugin I wrote alongside it](/articles/vault-link-obsidian-sync/).
 
 **The Rust core is generic; the FFI surface is not.** Inside Rust, the tokeniser is a `dyn Fn(&str) -> Vec<Token<T>>`. That dies the moment you try to pass it through wasm-bindgen or pyo3. The fix was a closed enum of built-in tokenisers for non-Rust callers, with the generic version reserved for Rust users. Not elegant, but the alternative was per-binding glue forever.
 
-**WASM size mattered enough to tune for it.** The release profile is aggressive about size, and the JS package ships a small leak detector that warns if you forget to free wasm-bindgen objects. I lost an afternoon to that the first time and didn't want anyone else to. The strangest target is React Native: Hermes doesn't run WASM, so the package transpiles the WASM back into JavaScript with Binaryen: slower, but the same Rust core gets to follow the library anywhere JavaScript runs.
+**WASM size mattered enough to tune for it.** The release profile is aggressive about size, and the JS package ships a small leak detector that warns if you forget to free wasm-bindgen objects. I lost an afternoon to that the first time and didn't want anyone else to.
 
 ## What's held up, what I'd change
 
 - **Kept:** the never-emits-markers, never-drops-edits guarantee. It's the only reason a sync engine can call this library without an escape hatch.
 - **Kept:** the comparison example against `diff-match-patch`. It's a runnable program in the repo showing exact inputs where the alternative is wrong. Way more convincing than a benchmark table.
-- **Regret:** the snapshot and fixture tests do well on regressions and badly on edge cases nobody has imagined yet. Three-way merging is exactly the shape of problem property-based testing was made for, and the generators still aren't written. Saying it here is partly a way of making myself do it.
+- **Cut:** the snapshot tests do well on regressions and badly on unknown edge cases. Three-way merging is exactly what proptest was made for, and I should have written generators on day one.
 - **Next:** I want to be more explicit about the boundary. reconcile-text is a merge primitive, not a live collab engine. If you have a keystroke stream and a real-time channel, use Yjs or Automerge. This library is for when you don't.
 
 ## If you take one idea from this
 
-Prose deserves a merger that prefers a slightly clumsy sentence over a conflict marker. Code doesn't. That one asymmetry is the whole reason the library exists in the shape it does; every other decision is downstream of taking it seriously.
+Prose deserves a merger that prefers a slightly clumsy sentence over a marker. Code doesn't. That one asymmetry is the whole reason the library exists in the shape it does; everything else fell out of taking it seriously.

src/content/posts/sdf-2d-ray-tracing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+title: A 2D Ray Tracer for the Browser, Tuned for the Phone in Your Pocket
+description: 'My BSc thesis library. The mobile GPU shaped the architecture: tile-based passes, deferred shading, shaders generated per scene and device.'
+date: 2026-05-08
+projectPeriod: 'Autumn-Winter 2020'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/sdf2d.jpg
+  alt: SDF-2D browser demo with soft lighting effects.
+tags: ['graphics', 'web', 'systems']
+featuredOrder: 3
+role: Library author
+stack:
+  ['TypeScript', 'WebGL', 'WebGL2', 'Signed distance fields', 'Dynamic shader generation']
+scale: Browser library, mobile-targeted, real-time on consumer GPUs, both WebGL1 and WebGL2 paths
+outcome: An NPM package and BSc thesis; the renderer behind the decla.red multiplayer game
+audience: recruiter-relevant
+links:
+  - label: NPM package
+    url: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sdf-2d
+  - label: Video
+    url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3cEtnZUNR0
+  - label: BSc thesis
+    url: /media/downloads/sdf2d-andras-schmelczer.pdf
+    download: true
+media:
+  - type: image
+    src: ./_assets/sdf2d.jpg
+    alt: Browser demo page showing SDF-2D scenes rendered with soft lighting effects.
+    caption: SDF-2D shipped as a TypeScript library, not a one-shot demo. That distinction shaped most of the design.
+---
+
+Winter 2020, BSc thesis deadline closing in, and the thing had to run acceptably on my advisor's laptop the day he graded it. That single shipping pressure exposed every lazy assumption in the architecture and picked the design: tile-based passes, deferred shading, shaders generated per scene and per device. A 2D ray tracer in the browser via signed distance fields: soft shadows, smooth reflections, no triangle mesh. The other half of the thesis was [decla.red](/articles/declared-shared-simulation-code/), the multiplayer game that proved the renderer survived a real game loop.
+
+## What "mobile GPU" actually meant
+
+A 2D SDF ray tracer is conceptually simple: for each pixel, march along a ray, sample the distance field, accumulate light. The implementation that works on a desktop NVIDIA card spends so much per pixel that a mobile GPU melts. So the design problem was never "can SDFs do soft shadows" (yes, easily), it was "what work can I avoid per pixel without giving up the look."
+
+Three constraints did most of the design work:
+
+- **WebGL1 and WebGL2 both supported.** No "modern browser only" cheat. That ruled out anything that needed compute shaders or storage buffers.
+- **No per-scene hand-tuned shader.** This is a library; users plug in their own scene descriptions. The renderer has to compile something appropriate at runtime.
+- **Acceptable on a phone.** Not "good when the user owns the right hardware." It had to be acceptable on the laptop my advisor used to grade the thesis.
+
+## How it actually runs
+
+- **Tile-based rendering.** Group pixels and reason about them together. Most regions of a frame share the same nearby geometry, so you can early-out enormous swathes of pixel work if you know the tile's bounds. This was the single biggest perf win.
+- **Deferred shading.** Separate "find the surface" from "shade the surface." Shadow casting and reflections need the same geometry queries; doing them once per pixel and reusing the result was worth the extra texture bandwidth.
+- **Generated shaders per scene and device.** If a scene has no reflective surfaces, the generated shader doesn't carry the reflection path. If the device only supports WebGL1, the shader doesn't reach for WebGL2 features. Static feature flags do this badly; runtime generation does it well.
+- **TypeScript scene descriptions, no DSL.** I prototyped a small DSL for SDF authoring and threw it away. Pride's expensive. Users describe scenes in plain TypeScript and the library compiles them down. A DSL would have meant one more language to teach and one more compiler to debug.
+
+## Held up, didn't hold up
+
+- **Held up:** the mobile constraint forced structural perf work instead of cosmetic perf work. When something only runs on a desktop GPU you mistake headroom for good architecture, and the rude awakening comes from a user.
+- **Held up:** keeping the library boundary clean. A demo can hide a messy implementation; a published package can't.
+- **Didn't:** I had no instrumentation around shader variants. Today I'd ship a small `?debug=1` overlay that prints exactly which shader got compiled for that session and why.
+- **Didn't:** the docs are words about ray marching. The ideas are visual; the explanation should have been too. Diagrams next time.

src/content/posts/vault-link-obsidian-sync.md

@@ -2,37 +2,36 @@
 title: An Obsidian Sync Built Around the Merger I Already Had
 description: 'VaultLink: self-hosted Obsidian sync. Edit in any editor, online or off, then come back to a converged vault. The app that justified reconcile-text.'
 date: 2026-05-30
-period: '2025-2026'
+projectPeriod: '2025-2026'
 thumbnail:
   src: ./_assets/vault-link.svg
   alt: 'The VaultLink logo: a chain-link mark in a soft gradient.'
+tags: ['systems', 'web', 'tools']
+role: Sync engine and server author
+stack:
+  [
+    'Rust',
+    'axum',
+    'sqlx',
+    'SQLite',
+    'WebSockets',
+    'TypeScript',
+    'Obsidian plugin',
+    'ts-rs',
+    'wasm-bindgen',
+    'reconcile-text',
+  ]
+scale: One Rust server, one TypeScript sync engine, three published consumers (Obsidian plugin, CLI, fuzz/deterministic test harnesses)
+outcome: A self-hosted Obsidian sync I trust enough to use as my primary vault transport
+audience: technical
 links:
   - label: Source
-    url: https://git.schmelczer.dev/andras/vault-link
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/vault-link
   - label: Docs
     url: https://vault-link.schmelczer.dev
-article:
-  tags: ['systems', 'web', 'tools']
-  stack:
-    [
-      'Rust',
-      'axum',
-      'sqlx',
-      'SQLite',
-      'WebSockets',
-      'TypeScript',
-      'Obsidian plugin',
-      'ts-rs',
-      'wasm-bindgen',
-      'reconcile-text',
-    ]
-  scale: One Rust server, one TypeScript sync engine, three published consumers (Obsidian plugin, CLI, fuzz/deterministic test harnesses)
-project:
-  title: VaultLink
-  selected: true
 ---
 
-I refuse to give up my editors. Obsidian on the phone, Vim on the laptop, VS Code at work, the occasional headless `sed` across the whole vault. None of them know about each other, none of them are going to learn to, and I'm not switching to whichever sync product picks a favourite. VaultLink is what that refusal costs: one Rust server, one TypeScript sync engine, an Obsidian plugin, a CLI, and two test harnesses. The merge primitive underneath everything is [reconcile-text](/articles/reconcile-text-3-way-merge/), which I had written first, on the bet that a question like this would eventually ask for it.
+I refuse to give up the editor. Obsidian on the phone, Vim on the laptop, VS Code at work, the occasional headless `sed` across the whole vault. None of them know about each other, none of them are going to learn to, and I'm not switching to whichever sync product picks a favourite. VaultLink is the architecture that falls out of that refusal: one Rust server, one TypeScript sync engine, an Obsidian plugin, a CLI, and two test harnesses. The merge primitive underneath it all is [reconcile-text](/articles/reconcile-text-3-way-merge/), which I wrote first. VaultLink is the question that made it worth writing, finally asked in earnest.
 
 ## The constraint that picks the algorithm
 
@@ -47,9 +46,9 @@ The sync engine is two loops, deliberately disentangled:
 - **Wire loop** (`syncer.ts`). Drains the single-consumer FIFO of pending HTTP and WebSocket ops. Updates a document's record fields (`remoteRelativePath`, `parentVersionId`, `remoteHash`) and writes content to whatever path the record currently holds. _Never moves files for path placement._
 - **Path reconciler** (`reconciler.ts`). Runs after every drained event. Best-effort pass that moves files on disk so `localPath === remoteRelativePath`. The move graph is topologically sorted. Records with pending local events are skipped; the reconciler only operates on settled ones. Failures (slot occupied by something untracked) are silent skips; the next pass retries.
 
-This split is the decision the rest of the engine leans on. It used to be one loop with both responsibilities, and the bug catalogue from that era reads like a confession: slot-collision stashes, "conflict-uuid" hacks, `MoveOnConflict.NEW`/`EXISTING` policy enums. Separating wire transport from path placement made most of it vanish, because the wire loop can now freely write `remoteRelativePath` to whatever the server returned, even when it disagrees with the file on disk, knowing the reconciler will never move anything out from under a queued user rename.
+The split is the load-bearing decision. It used to be one loop with both responsibilities, and the bug catalogue was a parade of slot-collision stashes, "conflict-uuid" hacks, and `MoveOnConflict.NEW`/`EXISTING` policy choices. Separating wire transport from path placement made most of that vanish: the wire loop can freely write `remoteRelativePath` to whatever the server returned, even if it disagrees with the file on disk, because the reconciler won't move anything out from under a queued user rename.
 
-Cycles in the move graph (A→B, B→C, C→A) are found with Tarjan's strongly-connected-components pass and resolved by reading every file in the cycle into memory and writing each back to its new slot; no tmp files. A write-ahead marker at `.vaultlink/swap-<uuid>.json` lists each leg along with the hash the source file is expected to have, so after a crash the reconciler can hash each `from`, work out which legs already ran, and replay only the rest. `.vaultlink/**` is hardcoded into the internal ignore pattern so the swap markers never themselves get synced.
+Cycles in the move graph (A→B, B→C, C→A) are resolved by reading every file in the cycle into memory and writing each back to its new slot; no tmp files. A write-ahead marker at `.vaultlink/swap-<uuid>.json` lists each leg. On startup the reconciler reads the marker, hashes each `from` to determine which legs ran, and replays the rest. `.vaultlink/**` is hardcoded into the internal ignore pattern so the swap markers never themselves get synced.
 
 ## Pending creates are Promises, not strings
 
@@ -61,27 +60,27 @@ If you're walking `events[]` and comparing docIds with `===`, you'll silently fa
 
 The catch-up handshake says "give me everything newer than `lastSeenUpdateId`." If the client advances that id as it receives a stream of RemoteChange ids out of order, it'll publish a too-high cursor, and the next reconnect will request from a point past events it never actually applied. Permanent gap. Replay-forever bug, with extra steps.
 
-The fix is a small data structure called `MinCovered`: a contiguous-prefix tracker over a stream of integers. It advances the public minimum only when the next consecutive id has been processed; out-of-order arrivals stash without bumping the cursor. The implementation is one screen of code, the test file is slightly longer than the implementation, and an entire category of confusing data-loss bugs stopped existing.
+The fix is a small data structure called `MinCovered`: a contiguous-prefix tracker over a stream of integers. It advances the public min only when the next consecutive id has been processed. Out-of-order arrivals stash without bumping the cursor. Five files of test, one screen of implementation, and an entire category of confusing data-loss bugs disappears.
 
 ## reconcile-text on the server
 
 The merge sits on the server. When two clients submit edits against the same `parent_version_id`, the second submission triggers a 3-way merge against the parent and the freshly-committed first edit. Three strings in, one out. No conflict markers. The engine commits the merged result, increments the version, and broadcasts the new state to every connected client.
 
-Two restrictions, neither hidden:
+Two restrictions, both honest:
 
-- **Only `.md` and `.txt` get merged.** Markdown that fails UTF-8 validation is treated as binary, same as PNGs and PDFs.
-- **Last-write-wins for everything else.** Concurrent edits to a `.docx` lose one of the writes. The real fix is "don't edit binaries concurrently", which is unsatisfying and true.
+- **Only `.md` and `.txt`.** Markdown that fails UTF-8 validation gets treated as binary, same as PNGs and PDFs.
+- **Last-write-wins for everything else.** Concurrent edits to a `.docx` lose one of the writes. The right fix is "don't edit binaries concurrently," which is unsatisfying but true.
 
 Merge quality is exactly what reconcile-text gives me. Word-level tokenisation turns most prose conflicts into two adjacent edits that coexist. If the merge looks slightly clumsy now and then, the alternative is a `<<<<<<< HEAD` block in my notes, and I'd take the clumsy sentence every time.
 
 ## Two test harnesses, one workflow
 
-A distributed-sync bug is bewildering the first time you see it and gone by the time you've attached a debugger. My answer is two harnesses with different jobs:
+Distributed-sync bugs are confusing the first time and impossible the second. The fix is two harnesses:
 
-- **`test-client` (fuzz).** N parallel processes hammering random operations against a shared server for minutes at a time. It catches the bugs nobody would have thought to write a test for, and its reproductions are unreadable.
-- **`deterministic-tests`.** Scripted multi-client scenarios, over a hundred of them by now, written in a small step grammar (`pause-server`, `pause-websocket`, `barrier`, `assert-consistent`) and run with an in-memory filesystem against the real server binary.
+- **`test-client` (fuzz).** N parallel processes hammering random ops against a shared server for minutes at a time. Catches bugs nobody thought to write a test for. Reproductions are noisy.
+- **`deterministic-tests`.** Scripted multi-client scenarios with a step grammar (`pause-server`, `pause-websocket`, `barrier`, `assert-consistent`) using an in-memory filesystem against a real server binary. Used to capture a fuzz-found bug as a minimal repro before fixing it.
 
-The workflow connects them: the fuzzer finds something, I sift the logs for a root cause, write the smallest deterministic scenario that fails the same way, then fix until both stay green. Without the second harness, every fix would be an act of faith.
+The workflow: fuzz finds something, I sift logs for a root cause, write the minimal deterministic test that fails on it, fix until both that test and the fuzz pass. Without the deterministic harness, every bug fix would be vibes-based.
 
 ## Smaller calls
 
@@ -89,7 +88,7 @@ The workflow connects them: the fuzzer finds something, I sift the logs for a ro
 - **`sqlx::query!` macros over a checked-in `.sqlx` cache.** SQL is verified against the schema at compile time. Touching SQL means re-running `cargo sqlx prepare --workspace`; if you forget, CI catches it.
 - **One sync engine, four consumers.** `sync-client` is the engine. Obsidian plugin, standalone CLI, fuzz harness, and deterministic harness all depend on it via `file:../sync-client`. Bugs are fixed once and inherited everywhere.
 - **`record.localPath` mutates in place across awaits.** The watcher can rename a doc while a wire-loop handler is mid-HTTP. Snapshotting `localPath` into a local at function entry and reading it after the await reads a vacated slot. Read it live; only snapshot when you deliberately want to compare _before_ and _after_ the await.
-- **Watermark advancement can fail in both directions.** A branch that skips a remote event without advancing `lastSeenUpdateId` creates a permanent gap that re-delivers forever; a branch that advances without applying the content loses data. The rule that survives code review: advance only if you applied the event or deliberately discarded it.
+- **Watermark advancement is load-bearing both ways.** Branches that skip a remote event without advancing `lastSeenUpdateId` create permanent gaps that re-deliver forever. Branches that advance without applying the content lose data. The rule that survives review is: advance only if you applied the event or deliberately discarded it.
 
 ## The race I haven't structurally fixed
 
@@ -104,4 +103,4 @@ The two-loop split doesn't fix this and probably shouldn't. The honest path is s
 - **A first-class "pause" with a write-ahead op log.** See above.
 - **More than `.md` and `.txt`.** A canvas-aware merge for Obsidian's `.canvas` files is one reconcile-text tokeniser away. Not because anyone asked, but because the asymmetry annoys me.
 
-The way I think about VaultLink now: reconcile-text was the bet, and VaultLink is what I built once the bet looked like paying off. The bet said three independently edited files can become one without anyone telling the system about the keystrokes that produced them. What building the application taught me is that the merge is the easy half; the real work is everything around it, arranged so the rest of the system can't undo what the merge got right.
+The way I think about VaultLink now: reconcile-text was the bet. VaultLink is what I built once the bet looked like it might pay off. The interesting part of the bet was always that three independently-edited files can become one without anyone telling the system about the keystrokes that produced them. The interesting part of the application is everything you have to do _around_ that merge to stop the rest of the system from undoing it.

src/content/projects/_assets/vault-link.svg

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+<svg width="200" height="200" viewBox="0 0 200 200" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
+  <defs>
+    <linearGradient id="grad1" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="100%">
+    <stop offset="0%" style="stop-color:#4A90E2;stop-opacity:1" />
+    <stop offset="100%" style="stop-color:#357ABD;stop-opacity:1" />
+    </linearGradient>
+  </defs>
+
+  <!-- Background circle -->
+  <circle cx="100" cy="100" r="90" fill="url(#grad1)" opacity="0.15"/>
+
+  <!-- Main vault icon -->
+  <g transform="translate(100, 100)">
+    <!-- Vault body -->
+    <rect x="-45" y="-50" width="90" height="80" rx="8" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="6"/>
+
+    <!-- Vault door circle -->
+    <circle cx="0" cy="-10" r="22" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="5"/>
+    <circle cx="0" cy="-10" r="14" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="3"/>
+    <circle cx="0" cy="-10" r="6" fill="url(#grad1)"/>
+
+    <!-- Vault handle -->
+    <line x1="0" y1="-4" x2="18" y2="-4" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="3" stroke-linecap="round"/>
+    <circle cx="18" cy="-4" r="4" fill="url(#grad1)"/>
+
+    <!-- Link chain -->
+    <g opacity="0.9">
+    <!-- Left link -->
+    <ellipse cx="-30" cy="40" rx="12" ry="8" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="4"/>
+    <!-- Right link -->
+    <ellipse cx="30" cy="40" rx="12" ry="8" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="4"/>
+    <!-- Center link connecting them -->
+    <ellipse cx="0" cy="40" rx="12" ry="8" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="4"/>
+    </g>
+
+    <!-- Sync arrows (subtle) -->
+    <g opacity="0.5">
+    <!-- Clockwise arrow top-right -->
+    <path d="M 35 -35 Q 50 -35 50 -20 L 50 -15" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="2.5" stroke-linecap="round"/>
+    <polygon points="50,-15 47,-22 53,-22" fill="url(#grad1)"/>
+
+    <!-- Counter-clockwise arrow bottom-left -->
+    <path d="M -35 25 Q -50 25 -50 10 L -50 5" fill="none" stroke="url(#grad1)" stroke-width="2.5" stroke-linecap="round"/>
+    <polygon points="-50,5 -47,12 -53,12" fill="url(#grad1)"/>
+    </g>
+  </g>
+</svg>

src/content/projects/ad-astra.md

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+---
+title: Ad Astra
+description: 'A handheld game built from a custom PCB up: ATtiny85V, OLED, IR, EEPROM. 8-bit ALU at 8 MHz, 50 FPS floor.'
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/ad-astra.jpg
+  alt: The Ad Astra handheld game running on its OLED display.
+period: 'Spring 2020'
+sortDate: 2020-04-01
+technologies: ['C', 'ATtiny85V', 'OLED', 'EEPROM', 'PCB design']
+selected: true
+essay: ad-astra-attiny85-game-engine
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/ad_astra
+---

src/content/projects/avoid.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: Avoid
+description: My first browser game, kept around so the timeline is honest.
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/avoid.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of the Avoid canvas game.
+period: 'January 2018'
+sortDate: 2018-01-01
+technologies: ['JavaScript', 'Canvas']
+selected: false
+essay: avoid-early-web-game
+---

src/content/projects/backup-container.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+---
+title: Backup Container
+description: A Bash container around BorgBackup. BTRFS snapshot for atomic consistency, numeric env vars for multi-target 3-2-1, sleep-loop instead of cron.
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/backup.png
+  alt: Placeholder thumbnail for the backup container project.
+period: '2024-2026'
+sortDate: 2024-06-01
+technologies: ['Bash', 'BorgBackup', 'BTRFS', 'Alpine', 'Docker', 'SSH', 'zstd']
+selected: false
+essay: backup-container-btrfs-borg
+links:
+  - label: Source
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/backup-container
+  - label: Container image
+    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/backup-container/pkgs/container/backup-container
+---

src/content/projects/city-simulation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+title: City Simulation
+description: A Unity city where REST-controlled traffic lights made bad PLC code visible as car crashes.
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/city-simulation.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of a Unity city traffic simulation.
+period: 'July-August 2018'
+sortDate: 2018-08-01
+technologies: ['Unity', 'C#', 'REST API', 'Blender']
+selected: false
+essay: city-simulation-unity-traffic
+links: []
+---

src/content/projects/colors.md

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+title: Photo Colour Grader
+description: Pick a colour, edit every nearby colour as a function of distance. A grader built around one interaction idea.
+thumbnail:
+  src: ./_assets/photo-colour-grader.jpg
+  alt: Screenshot of a colour grading interface applied to a photograph.
+period: 'June 2018'
+sortDate: 2018-06-01
+technologies: ['JavaScript', 'Canvas', 'Image processing']
+selected: false
+essay: photo-colour-grader
+links: []
+---