Hello, world

This is the first post on the rebuilt dirchev.me. It’s a text-first blog powered by Astro, which I’ll use to write about software, systems, and whatever else has been occupying my head.

This post exists mainly to exercise every feature I wired into the site, so I can check each one renders correctly.

Code blocks#

Fenced code blocks get syntax-highlighted by Shiki at build time — zero JS ships to the browser:

export function greet(name: string): string {
  return `hello, ${name}`;
}

Inline code works too. Here’s a shell example:

npm run dev
# then open http://localhost:4321

Internal links#

Every heading gets an auto-generated anchor — e.g. you can link straight to the Excalidraw section below. Cross-post links work too: point at /posts/<slug>/ from anywhere.

Custom elements#

A small set of MDX components is available for the kinds of callouts I reach for most:

Drawings#

Drawings are authored in Excalidraw and committed as raw .excalidraw JSON. A build step renders them to SVG and inlines the result:

Footnotes#

GitHub-flavored footnotes¹ render as numbered references with a back-link at the end of the post². Handy for citations without breaking the reading flow.

What’s next#

I’ll start moving selected posts over from the old site and writing new ones. No comments, no analytics, no search — just writing.