briggsbastian.com

On a portfolio site, the how is part of the portfolio. So this one is run like something that matters:

• Reproducible dev environment. The toolchain is pinned in a Nix flake: nix develop on any machine gives the same Node and the same everything, so there’s no “works on my laptop.”
• Static by default. Astro renders the whole site to plain HTML at build time. No client-side framework runtime, no hydration. Even the interactive homelab topology is laid out at build time, with a few dozen lines of vanilla JS for hover focus and scroll polish. Performance is what you’d expect from a static site, because it nearly is one.
• Everything goes through CI. Every push to my self-hosted Forgejo runs type checks, a full build, a gitleaks secret scan, and a nix build of the deployable artifact. Only when every gate is green does a mirror job publish to the public GitHub repo — a red commit never leaves the house. (A Dockerfile can still emit a multi-stage nginx image for container hosting elsewhere.)
• A reproducible artifact, hosted for free. The site is also a Nix package (nix build .#default), proven by CI on every push, so any box with Nix can serve the identical bytes. Production is GitHub Pages fed by the gated mirror — zero hosting cost — and because the artifact is a derivation, moving it onto my own fleet is a config change, not a migration.
• Content as data. Projects and garden notes are markdown with typed, schema-validated frontmatter. Bad metadata fails the build instead of shipping silently.

It’s a small system, but a complete one: declared environment, verified pipeline, reproducible artifact. The same shape scales up to the fleets I run elsewhere.