The site
Essays are stored as Markdown in a self-hosted Payload CMS (Postgres) and rendered server-side by an Astro frontend. Both run in Docker on a single small VPS in Bengaluru, fronted by nginx with TLS from Let’s Encrypt. The whole stack fits on one machine and is small enough that one person can keep it.
Type
Titles and the wordmark are set in Zen Antique, a serif with quiet bones and the mood of a private library. Body copy is Hanken Grotesk, an unfussy sans for paragraphs that need to stay out of the way. Dates and meta-labels use JetBrains Mono at a small uppercase size, with generous letter-spacing, to feel like a faint pencil margin.
Fonts are self-hosted via Fontsource. No third-party CDN sees which page you read.
Color
The site is dark-first by intention, not preference. Warm near-black surfaces, off-white text, hairline borders, and a single gold accent for links and the mark. There is no light-mode toggle. The five themes carry muted earth-tone accents (a desaturated blue for science, a thistle for philosophy, a warm sand for dharma, a lichen green for economics, a clay rose for beauty). They are never loud.
The banyan
The mark is a banyan tree in fine gold linework: one canopy, many trunks. It is the literal version of what this site is trying to be. The five themes (science, philosophy, dharma, economics, beauty) are the trunks. The thinking is the canopy. Every favicon and home-screen icon on every device derives from the same square of that banyan.
Newsletters are sent via Resend. The transactional templates use a light paper palette rather than mirroring the dark site. This is a deliberate concession: Gmail and Apple Mail aggressively auto-invert dark email in dark mode and produce illegible artifacts. Light renders consistently in every client.
How a post is made
Each essay starts as a Markdown file with a small YAML frontmatter (title, slug, excerpt, date). A short Node script on the laptop pushes the file through Payload’s API and the post is live within seconds. A second script generates the cinematic dark-palette hero image with Gemini, in a style consistent across the corpus. There is no build step on the author’s side; the SSR frontend renders each request live from the database.
Acknowledgments
This site stands on the work of Astro, Payload, Postgres, nginx, Resend, Fontsource, marked, and the Linux distribution underneath all of it. None of it is mine. The arrangement is.
Source
The site is single-author and not currently open source. If something here is interesting enough to want, write to hello@suhaskashyap.com and I will probably tell you how.