cthierer.github.io

My personal profile and resume site.

This repository builds my small static website for www.christhierer.com, including a profile homepage, an HTML resume, and a generated PDF resume. I want it to stay low-maintenance: content lives in Markdown, rendering is handled by a small React server-rendered build script, and GitHub Pages publishes the generated dist/ artifact.

Table of Contents

• Background
• Install
• Usage
• Content Maintenance
• Architecture
• Deployment
• Troubleshooting
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

Background

This is my personal web presence for engineering leadership job search, resume presentation, and small freelance credibility. It is built with React server rendering, TypeScript, Pico CSS, Lightning CSS, Markdown frontmatter, Zod validation, and WeasyPrint for the resume PDF.

The repository name matches the GitHub Pages convention. My production domain is configured in config.yaml.

Install

Use Node.js 26 or newer and Python 3.13 or compatible local Python tooling for PDF generation.

npm ci
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

If python3 -m venv .venv fails because ensurepip is unavailable on Debian/Ubuntu, install local venv support first:

sudo apt install python3-venv

Usage

Start a local rebuilding server:

PATH="$PWD/.venv/bin:$PATH" npm run dev

Build the site. The TypeScript build script renders HTML, bundles CSS, copies public assets, writes the sitemap, and generates PDFs for pages configured with pdf: true:

PATH="$PWD/.venv/bin:$PATH" npm run build

Build a private role-specific resume variant (for example, the ignored UMBC adjunct variant). The preset infers the shared baseline and variant directory, builds only the resume with analytics disabled, and writes its local submission PDF to variants/output/<variant>/resume.pdf:

PATH="$PWD/.venv/bin:$PATH" npm run build:resume -- umbc-adjunct \
  --contentDir variants/content-sensitive

Run the maintenance checks:

npm run check

Format the repository:

npm run format

The generated site is written to dist/. Treat dist/ as build output, not source. Public --outputDir overrides must stay within dist/; private resume overrides must stay below variants/output/.

Content Maintenance

Most routine updates I expect to make happen in content/:

• content/singles/ controls homepage hero, current focus, and at-a-glance copy.
• content/resume/ controls ordered resume sections, including profile, metrics, skills, experience, and education.
• content/experience/ controls work history for both the homepage and resume.
• content/education/ controls education entries.
• content/contact/ and content/social/ control header, footer, CTA, and resume links.
• content/organizations/ stores organization labels, locations, slugs, and logos used by experience entries.

Markdown frontmatter is validated during npm run build. Set published: true for entries that should render. See docs/maintenance.md for the practical update checklist and frontmatter notes.

Private resume patches belong under ignored variants/, where they can override the shared Markdown baseline without being deployed. See the private-variant workflow in docs/maintenance.md.

Architecture

• src/build/build.tsx resolves the public-build or resume-preset command options, while src/build/buildSite.tsx provides their shared pipeline: it cleans the selected safe output directory, loads configuration and resolved Markdown layers, copies public assets, bundles CSS, renders React pages to static HTML, generates configured PDFs, and writes a sitemap.
• config.yaml controls generated pages through its pages list. Add pdf: true to an HTML page entry to generate a PDF alongside it; for example, /resume.html produces /resume.pdf.
• src/styles/main.css is bundled and minified by Lightning CSS.
• src/pages/ contains page-level composition for the homepage and resume.
• src/components/ contains reusable page, profile, hero, link, site, and resume components.
• src/content/schemas/ contains the Zod schemas for Markdown frontmatter.
• public/ contains static assets copied into dist/.

Deployment

GitHub Pages deployment is handled by .github/workflows/pages.yml on pushes to main and manual workflow_dispatch runs. The workflow installs Node and Python dependencies, runs npm run check, builds my site, and uploads dist/ to Pages.

Troubleshooting

If a configured page has pdf: true, the build requires WeasyPrint. If weasyprint is not found locally, make sure the virtual environment is installed and prepended to PATH when building:

PATH="$PWD/.venv/bin:$PATH" npm run build

In some sandboxed environments, tsx may need approval because it opens an IPC pipe under /tmp.

Maintainer

I maintain this site. You can reach me at hello@christhierer.com.

Contributing

This is my personal website, so I am not expecting unsolicited pull requests. If you are helping me maintain the site, open an issue or coordinate with me directly before changing positioning, resume content, analytics, dependencies, or deployment behavior.

Before merging meaningful changes, run:

npm run check
PATH="$PWD/.venv/bin:$PATH" npm run build

License

UNLICENSED, copyright Chris Thierer.