jimmynewman.co

This site is the project. It is a personal blog and portfolio with no database, no CMS, and no auth — every page is prerendered at build time from MDX files in the repo. Publishing a post is merging to main; a draft is a branch, previewed on its Vercel deployment.

How it's built

The whole thing is assembled in thin tracer-bullet slices — small vertical cuts that touch every layer and actually work end to end before the next one starts. The first slice was a single real post rendering at its URL. Then the layout shell, then tags, then this Projects section, each shipped behind its own pull request with the tests to prove it.

The content pipeline is a deep module: MDX in, validated frontmatter and rendered pages out. A malformed frontmatter block fails the build loudly rather than shipping broken. Colour is driven entirely by semantic tokens — a rule the test suite enforces mechanically — so light and dark modes stay at parity from the first slice.