This site — an Astro PWA with build-time on-chain data.

Overview

A portfolio site is a strange product: it has one user who matters at a time, it gets judged in under a minute, and — for an engineer — it is the work sample. So this site is built the way I build products: static-first for speed, a real test suite, a real release process, and a couple of genuinely unusual tricks where they earn their place.

The stack is deliberately boring where boring is right — Astro 5, plain CSS, TypeScript strict — and interesting where it counts.

Build-time on-chain data

The two “live” elements on the homepage are fetched at build time, not in the browser:

• The avatar is a Solana NFT. At build, the site resolves the NFT’s current image via the Helius API and bakes it into the page. Change the NFT, redeploy, new avatar — no client-side wallet calls, no loading spinner.
• The open-source section is a live GitHub contribution graph, queried from the GitHub API during the build, so it’s always current as of the latest deploy.

The effect is data that is real — verifiable on-chain, verifiable on GitHub — with the runtime cost of a static page: zero API calls, nothing to rate-limit, nothing to fall over.

An installable, offline-capable PWA

The site ships as a progressive web app — Workbox service worker, install manifest, offline fallback — so it loads instantly on repeat visits and survives a dead connection. Search is Pagefind, indexed at build over the blog and case studies, served as static chunks: full-text search with no search server.

Tested like a product

The quality gates are the same shape I set up for client work:

• Functional end-to-end suite — Playwright across Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, run on every pull request.
• Visual regression guardrail — a playwright-bdd suite screenshots every primary route against committed baselines, so a styling regression or a blank page fails CI instead of reaching production.
• Prose linting — Vale runs over every blog post before publication.
• Lint, strict type-checking, and unit tests on every change.

Shipped like a product

GitFlow with a protected production branch: features PR into dev (staging), and a release is a single dev → main promotion that tags a version, publishes release notes, and deploys — one click, end to end. Cloudflare Pages serves production, a staging environment, and an ephemeral preview per pull request.

The code is open source under AGPL-3.0 — the engineering is there to read, which is the point of a portfolio. The content, writing, and identity stay mine.

Outcome

A fast, installable, offline-capable site where the interesting claims — the on-chain avatar, the live contribution graph, the test discipline — are verifiable rather than asserted. The repo is the case study.