Work
byreson.com
An evolving digital home designed to hold professional work and the rest of a life without flattening either one.
Personal project · 2026 · In development
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Python
- Cloudflare
The idea
This website is a personal digital home with a professional front door. It is designed to hold projects, writing, interests, experiments, and personal history without reducing everything to a portfolio.
Part of the point is ownership. Most of what people write ends up on platforms they do not control and cannot take with them. This is the version I control: my domain, my files, my format.
The approach
The public site is semantic HTML, modern CSS, and a small amount of progressive JavaScript. A Python builder using only the standard library turns Markdown and JSON into static routes, metadata, topic connections, RSS, a sitemap, and a lightweight search index.
Content drives everything. Publishing a piece of writing or a project means adding one file — the routes, topic relationships, feed entries, sitemap records and index appearances are generated from it. There is no page to update by hand.
Technical decisions
No framework. The site is content and typography. React or a similar framework would add a build pipeline, a dependency tree and a client bundle to a site whose defining quality is that it does not need one. The browser gets HTML, CSS, fonts and about 6 KB of JavaScript for the mobile menu. That is a deliberate engineering decision, not a limitation I am working around.
Standard library only. The builder has no third-party dependencies, so it does not rot. There is no lockfile to audit and nothing to reinstall before it will run.
Progressive enhancement. Every route is a real file. Reading works with JavaScript disabled; the script only enhances the responsive menu.
Content integrity in the build. Draft and verification content is gated by the compiler rather than by remembering. Anything marked as a draft or a demo fixture cannot reach the published site, and the build fails if an unfinished marker appears in published content.
What I learned
Constraints are easier to work with than options. Deciding early that there would be no framework, no database and no third-party runtime scripts removed most of the decisions I would otherwise have spent time on, and the parts I did build got more attention as a result.