# Hello, World

Every engineer eventually builds a personal website, and every personal
website apparently has to open with a post explaining itself. I see no reason
to fight tradition.

## How it's built

This site is a pile of static HTML generated by [Astro](https://astro.build),
with posts written in MDX and pushed to GitHub, where an Action rebuilds and
deploys everything to GitHub Pages. There's no backend, no database, and no
framework running in your browser. It's just HTML, CSS, and a small amount of
JavaScript doing things like the reading bar above this text.

<Callout type="note">
  The irony of an "AI Engineer" shipping a website with almost no JavaScript
  is not lost on me. Most of it was built in one long, occasionally heated
  conversation with Claude, which felt appropriate.
</Callout>

The few dynamic parts lean on other people's generosity: the footer shows the
current weather at whichever large airport is nearest to you, and the
[flying page](/flying/) rebuilds itself daily from my actual VATSIM history:
hours, routes, and a map of everywhere I've recently pretended to land an
A320. If the numbers on that page look unimpressive, I'd like to stress that
they are at least real.

## Why it exists

Mostly because engineering is changing at a pace I can only describe as
character-building, and writing things down is the cheapest way I know to
keep up. This is where I'll put what I'm learning, whether that's building
with AI, the odd transport tangent, or whatever else currently has my
attention, before I've had time to pretend I knew it all along.

If any of it turns out to be useful to someone else, that's a bonus. If not,
at least the weather in the footer is accurate.