Colophon a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies
Author #
All posts on this site are written by Waylon Walker, the typical content has changed and evolved over time. I go back and make a few corrections, but for the most part things stay pretty much as they were published originally.
see more in Waylon Walker
Why I Built This Site #
from scratch
I got tired of:
- Build times that took forever
- Node modules folders that became black holes
- Bloated pages that took ages to load
- SEO tools that felt like an afterthought
You know what I think I can do this better.
So I built my own platform chiseled from scratch by hand using python, some open source modules and many ideas in my head of what I wanted for my own system. Then Agents hit the market in Nov 2025 and by Jan 2026 I was interested in trying some spec driven development. I carefully created a prompt to have the latest gpt models at the time re-imaging what I made by hand in go. It continues to grow at a much faster pace now that I can have agents doing the work. Its still my playground. My personal software that I get to craft into just exactly what I want it to be. Its not always perfect or correct, but it generally trends up.
It’s under-funded, over-dreamed, barely documented, and I love it. This site is my sandbox for learning, teaching, and sharing ideas on my own terms.
tech #
This site is a static site build with my own static site generator markata, Thoughts or as Simon Willison calls it a link blog posts are pulled in as a regular posts, all is hosted on cloudflare pages.
see more about these components in about this site
Basement Kubernetes #
Literally my homelab, a bunch of stuff stuffed in the basement, There’s one fully hidden dell optiplex in the back.
Yes I run kubernetes in my basement. Yes it is build on a hodge podge of trash and enough new parts to get it to work. No this does not have 100% uptime, my house looses power, flaky deploys sometimes have brief outages.
Tip of the at to low tech mag. Leaning in on building cool things on the weird edges of the internet. Not being so tied to 9 9s, infinite uptime, instant gratitude always on demand.
This is part of the charm now. I know that its a common trope something twitter likes to laugh at and poke fun at. I’ll wipe my tears away with my six figure job that I am able to do really well because I have a place to low risk do new tech on a platform that is very similar to what makes $$ in infrastructure. I think I will be okay, and if I have an outtage, we will lean into that as the charm of a side project running on kubernetes in my basement that does not get quite the same level of attention as work I get paid to do and includes crazy new things I’m not yet willing to try in a real app with paying users.
Everything from the git repo, the site build, the production traffic all routes through hardware that I own and can touch, no one can turn off and stop. I rely on one cloudflare tunnel to get it out to the public otherwise its all on me.
Analytics #
I do not track users, I respect the privacy of my readers and do not track their information. I do track analytics on my own writing a post rate. Its more of an interesting history of the site.
I try to take some time each year to review and highlight some of the highs and lows, some of the different trends on that analytics page. Its a fun summary of year over year.
meta #
Some evergreen pages that are more about me or this site from the Posts tagged: meta feed.