Tech Stack

In case you’re wondering about the technology powering this project, here’s a quick overview. The current version of this site is built with:

• Astro: a frontend framework and static site generator
• Tailwind CSS: the most widely-used atomic CSS library
• MDX: essentially Markdown with custom components transformed by the Rust-based Sätteri
• Unpic and imagor: responsive images transformed on demand from a self-hosted server

Map Component

• Protomaps
• MapLibre
• React Map GL
• React
• React Query: data fetching and client-side caching
• Turf: geospatial analysis utilities
• Zustand: lightweight state management

Utilities and Tooling

• TypeScript
• Sharp and Satori: image processing and OpenGraph image generation
• Pagefind: static full-text search across the entire site
• kdbush and geokdbush: geospatial indexing for nearby location lookups
• Transformers.js and USearch: LLM-powered embeddings and vector search for similar content
• Remeda: TypeScript-first utility library
• Vite
• Zod: TypeScript and runtime data schema validation
• Type set in Lora and Geologica
• Prettier, type-aware ESLint, Stylelint, and Knip
• Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code

Previous Version

Spectral Codex 1.0 ran on WordPress and a fully-featured theme built with Timber, Twig, and Carbon Fields. An elaborate build system patched together with Gulp and Webpack allowed for a highly optimized output similar to what you might achieve when using Roots ecosystem tools, but the burden of maintenance was significant. Magazine-style image layout was facilitated with lazysizes and a hefty chunk of specialized code. Styling was accomplished with Sass. Finally, interactivity was accomplished entirely without jQuery; everything from comments handling to dropdown menus was 100% TypeScript without any UI framework.