Brand Upgrade Sprint Kickoff
This week I kicked off the 2026 brand upgrade sprint — eight phases, starting with the design system and working outward through every page on the site. W17 is phase zero through three landing in the same week, which felt ambitious on Monday and feels earned by Friday.
What shipped
Design system locked. The Binance-inspired token set is now the single source of truth: one accent color (Binance Yellow #F0B90B), opaque cards with 12px radius, whisper shadows at 5% opacity, and BinancePlex as the primary typeface across all weights. No glass, no tri-color gradients, no hover-lift. The constraint is the point — a fintech trading floor aesthetic applied to a developer portfolio creates an unusual signal-to-noise ratio that I think works.
Content Collections schema extended. The diary collection now has the full field set: mood, week, publicPrivate, translationOf. The projects collection got metrics30d for optional revenue/retention data. Zod validation catches schema drift at build time, not at runtime.
This diary route. The /diary page you’re reading right now is the new collection-driven timeline. The legacy money-challenge tracker is gone — it was a useful placeholder but the format was wrong. Weekly entries in prose give me more room to think out loud than a day-counter with a dollar progress bar.
The technical decision I kept second-guessing
Whether to use MDX or plain Markdown for diary entries.
MDX lets you embed components inline — I could drop a mood chart or a metrics tile directly in the prose. But it adds complexity to the content pipeline and I don’t actually need components in short-form writing. The friction of MDX outweighs the flexibility for a 200–500 word weekly entry.
Plain Markdown won. The components live at the page level (mood badge, diary card) and the prose stays clean. If I ever need an inline component I can revisit — YAGNI applies to content formats too.
What I noticed about the design constraint
Working inside a strict palette — one accent, no new colors — forces every visual decision to be structural rather than decorative. You can’t reach for a new color to solve a hierarchy problem. You have to solve it with size, weight, spacing, or contrast. That discipline is uncomfortable for about the first hour and then it speeds everything up considerably.
The design system doc I wrote before touching code turned out to be worth every minute. Having the hex values, shadow values, and radius scale written down meant I was never making a decision twice.
Next
W18 will be the home and about page rewrite — tightening the positioning copy and syncing the visual updates across the above-fold hero. The GitHub stats section needs the contribution grid recolored to the Binance yellow tier system.
The sprint is on track. Eight phases, roughly one per week. Let’s see.