Colophon

Type

The primary typeface used across most body text, headings, the wordmark, etc is Valkyrie, a typeface designed by Matthew Butterick, whose Practical Typography influenced the design of this website.

The sans-serif font is Source Sans 3, a free font from Adobe designed by Paul D. Hunt.

Design

The color scheme is Rosé Pine, in the dawn variant for light mode (with a pure white background because I’m not a fan of the cream) and main variant for dark mode.

Tech

This site was built with the static site generator library called Hakyll. It’s configured with a Haskell eDSL, and insanely hackable. It uses blaze-html, an HTML combinator library, for templating, and verifies behavior with LiquidHaskell, an interactive theorem prover that integrates into Haskell which refines its types with logical predicates to enforce properties at compile time. All of the pages are written in the Typst language, through its HTML output feature.

There’s a little more history to my website, actually. Originally, this site was powered by my own static site generation system called “Epilogue” which I wrote in Rust, implementing low level details by hand. It used a Rust macro for HTML templating, so you could write template logic in the exact same language as the rest of the website, and keep the type system around, too.

The main reason I wrote my own static site generator was to use Typst as the primary markup language for writing pages. Typst is essentially a LaTeX replacement that implements a rich markup language kind of like Markdown, but with a fully featured scripting system builtin, no templating engine required. It primarily targets PDFs, but also does HTML export. For example, the CV is actually the exact same Typst source file under the hood, compiled to both HTML and PDF targets.

Around a year after the initial website deployment using Epilogue I had still not implemented feed generation, tagging, and other standard SSG features, which was suboptimal. I had spent the past year climbing the latter of mathematical abstraction, so rather than waste time implementing such trivial features, I decided to try my hand once again at actual Haskell development and began looking into the Hakyll system.

It turns out that Hakyll is really, really good. It’s less of an SSG itself and more of an SSG library that you use to implement your own custom site generator. By default, it uses traditional HTML templates, but I was easily able to write a custom “compiler” to integrate blaze-html, an HTML combinator library for Haskell that allowed me to write the HTML in Haskell itself. This was similar to the Rust macro templating system I had before, except Haskell is so expressive that metaprogramming is not even necessary and it could be implemented as a straightforward monad.

But the crux of all of this was that the Typst compilation technology was still easily possible. See, Hakyll does not impose any opinions on what inputs go into the website and what outputs come out. It provides a Pandoc compiler by default, but you can replace this with anything you want, so I wrote a Typst compiler that integrated seamlessly. This means that Typst is supported just as well as in Epilogue, but you get a slew of nice features for free, like feed generation. I can also write, say, Markdown or rst or even Literate Haskell in some other page and have that rendered just as easily by writing a custom rule, so I’m not locked into Typst.

I’ve owned this domain and had a personal website since 2023. Here is my old website, which I’ll keep online for archival purposes until it becomes too much work to do so.