How this site works

This site is a custom static site generator built with Bun and TypeScript. I wanted to understand every line of code on my site … well, nearly everything. 1I’m not a SWE by trade. With the advent of LLMs, I’m able to adopt Robin Sloan’s “Home cooked app” ethos Most frameworks are black boxes and annoying. I saw Justin Duke’s setup and thought: I can do that.

Stack

• Bun: Replaces Node, npm, and webpack. Fast.
• TypeScript: Types keep me honest.
• Tailwind CSS: For styling. Gets out of the way.
• Markdown-It: Markdown → HTML.

No React. No hydration. No 500kb JavaScript bundles. Just HTML and CSS.

Build

Everything happens in src/build.ts. One file, top to bottom:

1. Read markdown files from content/
2. Extract frontmatter (title, date, ratings)
3. Process markdown with custom rules:
   • Wikilinks: [[Page Name]] becomes internal links1I’m not a SWE by trade. With the advent of LLMs, I’m able to adopt Robin Sloan’s “Home cooked app” ethos
   • Footnotes: becomes expandable inline notes
4. Find backlinks by scanning who links to whom
5. Generate HTML using template strings
6. Write to dist/

That’s it. No bundler, no magic.

Speed

The whole site builds in under a second:

$ bun run build
📍 Building Ryan's Blog...
✅ Build Complete!

I edit a file, run build, it’s done. No webpack. No dev server. 2Most of the time, I don’t even run a build as I use Obsidian with a Git plugin, so commits happen automatically when I save.