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A note on how this site works, for anyone curious — or for future me, trying to remember why past me did something.
The whole thing is open source at github.com/asenetcky/asenetcky.dev.
The stack
Quarto renders the pages. Source is a mix of Markdown (.md) and Quarto documents (.qmd), the latter of which can embed executable R or Python. Posts that include code get computed at build time and cached via Quarto’s freeze mechanism, so I don’t re-run a six-hour model every time I fix a typo.
renv pins the R environment. If you clone the repo and run renv::restore(), you get the exact package versions the site was built with.
GitHub Actions builds the site on every push to main and deploys the result to GitHub Pages. The custom domain (asenetcky.dev) is a DNS CNAME; GitHub handles HTTPS automatically via Let’s Encrypt.
Design
Two custom Sass partials in the repo root, theme-light.scss and theme-dark.scss, handle colors and typography. A small styles.css handles layout pieces that don’t change between modes (content width, the hero block, the post listing grid). Quarto’s built-in light/dark toggle does the rest.
The accent color is #3b6ea8 — a muted blue that is sort of like what I wish my kitchen used with butcher block tops… one can dream.
Fonts: Inter for body and UI, JetBrains Mono for code. Both served from Google Fonts.
Comments are handled by giscus, which backs comment threads with GitHub Discussions. If you leave a comment it appears both here and in the repo’s Discussions tab.
Why these choices and not others
Quarto instead of a general-purpose static site generator. Hugo is faster, Astro is more flexible, Eleventy is more JavaScript-native. None of them natively execute R. Most of what I write starts as analysis I’m already doing in Quarto for work; using Quarto for the blog means my scratch notebook and my published post are the same file. When I inevitably realize a chart needs a fix, I re-render one file and push. That’s hard to give up.
Custom SCSS instead of a theme. I started on Bootswatch’s lux and spent more time overriding it than I would have spent writing CSS from scratch. Themes make design decisions you’ll want to un-make. A hundred lines of Sass is cheaper than fighting a five-thousand-line framework.
GitHub Pages instead of Netlify or Cloudflare. Both are excellent. GitHub Pages won on surface area: the code, the CI, the deploy, and the issue tracker all live behind one login. One fewer dashboard to remember the password for.
Credits
- Inter by Rasmus Andersson
- JetBrains Mono by JetBrains
- Bootstrap Icons by the Bootstrap team
- Quarto by Posit
- giscus by Ikko Ashimine et al.
- The Connecticut R User Group, which is where a lot of what I write about gets its first read.
Last rebuilt: April 24, 2026.