Thank you for visiting Notes & Waymarks, a minimalistic blog bringing you articles about web development, reading, gaming, mountain biking, and other things I find interesting enough to write about.
The stack
Technically, the site is built with Strapi as the backend CMS and TanStack Start as the frontend framework. It's my first time using both of these technologies properly, and I needed a real project to help me learn them — Notes & Waymarks was born out of that (eventually!).
I've really enjoyed the experience so far, and hopefully the site will grow alongside my knowledge of Start, which I've found genuinely interesting to work with — particularly its approach to server functions and loaders, which felt like a different way of thinking about data fetching compared to what I'd used before.
The coding was around 90% done "manually," old-school style, although Claude did help with certain aspects — things like wiring up Prism.js for code syntax highlighting, and setting up the site's SEO (a task that used to be painstakingly boring, and honestly still kind of is, just faster now). The design and CSS were all done outside of AI, so this is pretty much AI-slop-free where it actually matters most: how the thing looks and feels.
Here's a small taste of that Prism.js integration in action:
print('hello Notes & Waymarks')The design process
I'd attempted to build several blog sites before this one, but this time I really wanted to try designing something from the ground up instead of blindly coding and seeing what happened. The first step was opening Figma and throwing some designs together — trying to work the way an actual frontend designer would, building components, defining styles, thinking in reusable pieces rather than one-off pages.
That process gave me a basic structure to work from, and along the way I found myself pulled toward a particular direction: Penguin Classics book cover design. There's something about the restraint of that style — the typography, the use of negative space, the way a good cover says a lot with very little, the photography on the covers is also always creative and interesting — that felt like the right starting point for a blog that's meant to be about reading and writing as much as it is about code.
If you'd like to read more about Penguin Classics design, here are some great links:
Jim Stoddart Blog (Penguin art director)
Thanks for reading
If you've made it this far, thank you — genuinely. Starting a blog is one of those things that's easy to think about and surprisingly hard to actually begin, and having even one person read past the first paragraph makes it feel worth doing.
Going forward, you can expect a mix of things here: write-ups on web development as I keep learning (TanStack Start and Strapi included, since I'm still very much figuring both out), thoughts on books I've been reading, the odd post about a game that's eaten too much of my free time, and hopefully some mountain biking content once the weather and my legs cooperate. I'm not planning to stick to a strict schedule or a narrow niche — this is meant to be a space for whatever I'm genuinely interested in at the time, which felt more honest than forcing it into one lane.
If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around. More soon.