Under the hood — Asymmetrica

The stack

Astro 5 — static-site framework. Output is plain HTML and CSS with a few lines of progressive-enhancement JavaScript (the background and the mobile menu); no framework runtime ships. The build runs once, the output is served as files. There is no server in production.
Cloudflare Pages at the edge — global CDN, automatic TLS, HTTP/3, brotli compression, and security headers from a committed _headers file. A git push triggers a build; the output is distributed to Cloudflare's edge in a couple of minutes.
Cloudflare DNS — the apex and the product subdomain resolve here. The domain is registered at Hostinger and delegated to Cloudflare's nameservers.
No VPS, by design. An earlier version of this site lived on a single Hetzner box behind Caddy and Docker Compose. When the box went down it took the sites with it — so we moved to static builds on a CDN. Nothing to patch, nothing to keep alive, nothing a payment hiccup can take offline.

Typography

Body: Rubik — variable font, weights 300–900. Self-hosted as woff2 with latin + latin-ext subsets.
Display (headings): Space Grotesk — variable font, 300–700. Same hosting model.
Accent (italic pulls, mantras): Crimson Text — static font, four weights. Used sparingly.
Font drift fix: font-synthesis: none is set on html, plus grayscale antialiasing on macOS. This was the fix that resolved muddy bold weights when porting from Mac to Windows browsers.

What we don't ship

No Google Analytics, Hotjar, or any third-party analytics scripts.
No advertising trackers. No marketing pixels.
No client-side JavaScript framework runtime. The apex ships a few lines of progressive-enhancement JS and nothing else.
No dark patterns. No exit-intent modals. No "we use cookies" banner because we don't set any.

Security baseline

Browser security headers: X-Frame-Options: DENY, X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin.
Email deliverability: SPF, DMARC monitoring.
security.txt at the well-known path (RFC 9116).

Source

The site source lives in our asymmetrica-web repo at apps/studio-site/, alongside the AsymmFlow site source and the shared design tokens. Each site is a static Astro build deployed as its own Cloudflare Pages project. Architectural decisions live in the same repo.

What inspired this site

A few websites we look up to: Kailash Nadh's personal site (the prose-first lineage), oat.zone (anti-trend craft), and Maggie Appleton's essays (intelligent typography). We are nowhere near as good as them yet, but we are trying.

The Asymmetrica mark — three overlapping ensō orbits in gold, ink, and forest green — is our way of nodding at the three-regime patterns that show up in the work we experiment with. The math is real; the symbol is just a quiet thank-you.