Colophon

How this site is built.

The site itself, explained — the stack, the artwork, and the pipe that serves it.

Stack

Framework: Next.js 16 · App Router · static export; output: "export" — every page is prerendered to plain HTML at build time. There is no server anywhere in this site.
UI: React 19 · TypeScript 5; Client-side JavaScript is limited to what needs it: the hero parallax, the star field, and live GitHub star counts on Projects.
Styling: Tailwind CSS v4; CSS-first configuration — design tokens live in an @theme block, reusable pieces in @layer components. No tailwind.config file.
Type: Satoshi · JetBrains Mono; Both self-hosted through next/font, so rendering the page makes zero external font requests.
Images: sharp; A small build script converts source art to WebP. The hero went from a 2.0 MB PNG to a 243 KB WebP.

The artwork

The hero artwork: a Van Gogh-styled night landscape with swirling sky, mountains, and a winding gravel path through grass

The landscape is a Midjourney generation — prompted toward a Van Gogh night-sky treatment of a zen garden, iterated across variant grids until one composition held up at full width.

On the home page it is never shown as a rectangle: CSS mask-image fades both edges so it emerges from behind the nav and dissolves into the page, a directional scrim protects only the text side, and a scroll-linked parallax moves it a few pixels. All motion respects prefers-reduced-motion.

Palette

Every color is sampled from the artwork, so the interface and the image read as one object. The accent is the gold of the stars and moon glow — a split-complement to the blue field — at 12.1:1 contrast on the page surface, well past WCAG AAA.

#080D12page surface
#0B1A24elevated surfaces
#4A7A9Bborders, tertiary
#9BAEBBbody text
#E8C97Aaccent
#EAF3F5headings

Serving it

browser

Route 53 · DNS

CloudFront · CDN + TLS

S3 · static files

All AWS, no platform-as-a-service: DNS on Route 53, TLS and caching on CloudFront, and the exported HTML sitting in an S3 bucket. Deploying is one command — build, sync the output to S3, invalidate the CDN cache.

The source is public at github.com/KyleSkudlarek/kyleskudlarek.com.

Roadmap

An MDX pipeline — posts written in markdown that can embed live React components, so a guide can carry runnable code and a progress log can carry an interactive chart. Essays, guides, reviews, and experiments will all land here as they are written.