sempe.dev

Personal website and blog for Lucas Sempé, built with Astro and deployed to GitHub Pages.

Live: sempe.dev

Running locally

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:4321
npm run build    # writes static output to dist/
npm run preview  # serve the built output

Node 20 or later, matching the CI runner.

Layout

The repository root is the Astro project. There is no nested site folder.

astro.config.mjs        site URL + Tailwind v4 via @tailwindcss/vite
src/pages/              routes: index, cv, projects, publications, rss.xml.ts, blog/
src/layouts/Layout.astro  shared shell: nav, footer, meta, RSS link
src/content/blog/*.md   blog posts (27)
src/content/config.ts   blog frontmatter schema
src/styles/global.css   Tailwind entry point
public/                 shipped verbatim into the build root
scripts/                local helpers, never run by CI
.github/workflows/      astro-deploy.yml

Adding a blog post

Drop a Markdown file into src/content/blog/, add a matching PNG at public/images/blog/<slug>.png, and include frontmatter:

---
title: "..."
subtitle: "..."     # optional
summary: "..."      # optional, shown on the blog index and homepage cards
date: 2026-09-28
tags: ["..."]       # optional
categories: ["..."]# optional
featured: false     # optional, pins the post to the homepage
draft: false        # optional, set true to keep it out of the build
---

The slug is the filename. Header images are generated rather than sourced: npm run blog-images runs scripts/generate-blog-images.js, which uses canvas and roughjs to draw each theme's icon into public/images/blog/. Those two packages are devDependencies, so the script only runs locally.

What lives in public/

Astro does not process public/; it copies it to the build root unchanged. Most of the site's weight sits here, produced outside this repository.

• books/ml/ — Machine Learning Concepts, 49 chapters plus an appendix, served at /books/ml/.
• books/small-n/ — Small-n Approaches to Impact Evaluation, 19 chapters plus three appendices and a separate evidence-synthesis page, served at /books/small-n/.
• small-n/ — an earlier 13-chapter build of the same book, left at the old path. Nothing links to it any more; /books/small-n/ is the live copy, and this directory is a candidate for deletion.
• sr-platform/ — ten saved HTML pages documenting the systematic review platform, each alongside a *_files/ directory of assets. These carry meta robots noindex.
• orthogonality-report.html — a standalone rendered report, linked from Projects.
• uploads/ — CV, résumé and paper PDFs.

images/, CNAME and the favicons are here too.

Both books are Quarto output. Rebuilding one means rendering it with Quarto elsewhere and copying the result back in; the Astro build never touches these files, and a npm run build will not notice if they change.

Deployment

Pushing to main triggers .github/workflows/astro-deploy.yml, which runs npm ci, npm run build, and publishes dist/ to GitHub Pages. No manual build step, and no branch to merge into first.

The custom domain comes from public/CNAME, which is copied into the build output.

History worth knowing

An astro-site/ folder used to sit here. The Astro migration originally lived inside it, was flattened to the root, and the folder was deleted. It was then accidentally re-created holding a single stale copy of index.astro, which stayed tracked for months and absorbed two profile edits that were meant for the live page. It was removed in 4c52f39. Nothing should recreate it: edit src/pages/ at the root, not a subfolder.

The repository lives in a OneDrive folder, which periodically drops Windows desktop.ini files into every directory, .git included. Those files inside .git/refs/ are read as refs and break git fetch with fatal: bad object refs/desktop.ini. If that happens, delete them:

Get-ChildItem .git -Recurse -Force -Filter desktop.ini -File | Remove-Item -Force