Sam Foshee — Posts

Hello, world

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the first post on the new site. It exists primarily to prove that the content layer, MDX rendering, prose styles, and routing wire up correctly across all three candidate themes.

A sub-heading

If you can read this with reasonable typography, things are working. The goal of this seed post is to exercise enough Markdown surface — headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, inline code, code blocks — that the prose stylesheet can be evaluated honestly.

A pull quote, just to exercise blockquote styling. The Brutalist Mono theme should render this with a hard left border; the Warm Essayist with an italicized soft rule.

A list:

One item
Another item
A third item

A small inline code example, and a code block:

const greeting = 'hello';
console.log(greeting);

That’s all for now — Phase 2’s job is just to prove the seed renders.

Tools I use

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every developer-leaning personal site eventually has one of these. Mine is short on purpose: tools matter less than people pretend, and the list churns more than it should. What follows is what I’m actually using right now — not a 2017 snapshot kept alive out of nostalgia.

Editor

VS Code with about ten extensions. The ones that earn their keep: the Astro extension (syntax), ESLint, Prettier, GitLens, and the built-in JSON + YAML support. I tried Zed for a few weeks and it’s good but I came back for the extension ecosystem.

Terminal

Ghostty. Fast, sane defaults, no ceremony. Before that I lived in iTerm2 for years. Before that, Terminal.app — which is also fine.

Languages I reach for first

TypeScript for anything that will outlive a weekend
Go for anything that needs to be a single static binary
Python for one-off data work and notebooks
Bash when “one-off” turns out to mean “ten times”

Git

Plain git from the command line. I’ve tried Tower, GitHub Desktop, the editor integrations — none of them stuck. The CLI is faster once your fingers know it.

This site’s stack

Astro 6 static output, TypeScript strict, Tailwind v4, MDX, Cloudflare Pages, one Cloudflare Worker for the contact form. Self-hosted Source Serif 4. The whole thing lives in one repo with no build server beyond Cloudflare’s.

What’s deliberately not on the list

JetBrains, Jira, Slack apps that auto-launch on boot, browser extensions that “boost productivity.” None of those make me think better.

(Phase-4 generic placeholder — rewrite when you have a real list.)

What's on my desk

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Less interesting than people pretend; more interesting than people admit. Here is what is actually within arm’s reach right now, in roughly the order I’d notice if it were missing.

The screen

A 27-inch 4K display, slightly off-center because the sun is in my eyes when it’s centered. Plugged into a laptop sitting closed in a vertical stand. The laptop hasn’t been opened in three months.

Input

A mechanical keyboard with brown switches — quiet enough to use on calls. A trackpad to the left of it (I’m right-handed, but the trackpad lives on the left so my dominant hand stays on the keys). The trackpad has a coffee stain that has been there since November.

Not-computers

A small lamp with a warm bulb. A plant that has survived four years of neglect. A water bottle I refill twice a day. A notebook open to a page that mostly has the date written on it. A black pen, refilled.

What’s missing

A second monitor. Stickers. Anything labeled “ergonomic.” A standing desk — I tried two of those and went back to sitting.

The most surprising thing about workspace photos online is how staged most of them are. The ones I trust have a wrinkled sleeve in frame.

(Phase-4 generic placeholder — rewrite when you have a real desk.)