nickthiru.dev

Personal website and blog for Nick Thiru — built with SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, and markdown-in-repo publishing.

Quick Start

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start development server
npm run dev

# Build for production
npm run build

# Preview production build
npm run preview

Project Structure

src/
├── content/
│   └── posts/          # Markdown blog posts
├── lib/
│   ├── components/     # Reusable Svelte components
│   ├── utils/          # Helper functions
│   └── config.ts       # Site configuration
├── routes/
│   ├── +layout.svelte  # Root layout
│   ├── +page.svelte    # Home page
│   ├── writing/        # Blog post listing & detail
│   ├── engineering/    # Technical posts (filtered)
│   ├── operating/      # Operator posts (filtered)
│   ├── projects/       # Projects showcase
│   ├── about/          # About page
│   ├── now/            # Now page
│   ├── subscribe/      # Email subscription
│   ├── rss.xml/        # RSS feed
│   └── sitemap.xml/    # XML sitemap
└── app.css             # Global styles (Tailwind)

Adding a New Post

1. Create a new .md file in src/content/posts/:

---
title: "Your Post Title"
slug: "your-post-slug"
description: "A brief description for SEO and cards."
publishedAt: "2025-01-20"
track: "technical" # or "operator"
tags: ["tag1", "tag2"]
draft: false
---

Your post content here...

2. Save and the post will appear automatically.

Frontmatter Schema

Field	Type	Required	Description
title	string	Yes	Post title
slug	string	Yes	URL slug (no leading slash)
description	string	Yes	1-2 sentence summary
publishedAt	string	Yes	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD)
track	"technical" | "operator"	Yes	Content category
tags	string[]	No	Topic tags
draft	boolean	No	Hide from production if true
updatedAt	string	No	ISO date if updated
canonical	string	No	Canonical URL if cross-posted
image	string	No	OG image path

How Tracks Work

Posts are categorized into two tracks:

• technical — Engineering content: architecture, code, infra, benchmarks, postmortems
• operator — Business content: positioning, pricing, distribution, customer insights

The track determines which filtered index the post appears in:

• /writing — All posts
• /engineering — Posts with track: "technical"
• /operating — Posts with track: "operator"

Draft Posts

Set draft: true in frontmatter to hide a post from production builds.

During development (npm run dev), drafts are visible so you can preview them.

Deploying to Vercel

Initial Setup

1. Push your code to GitHub
2. Go to vercel.com and create a new project
3. Import your GitHub repository
4. Vercel will auto-detect SvelteKit and configure the build

Configuration

The project uses @sveltejs/adapter-vercel for server-side rendering and API routes.

Automatic Deployments

• Production: Every push to main triggers a production deploy
• Previews: Every PR gets a preview deployment URL

Custom Domain

1. Go to Project Settings → Domains
2. Add nickthiru.dev
3. Update DNS as instructed

Environment Variables

See docs/newsletter-subscription.md for full details.

Variable	Required	Description
BREVO_API_KEY	Yes	Brevo API key for newsletter subscription
BREVO_WEBHOOK_SECRET	Yes	Shared secret for webhook authentication
PUBLIC_URL	Yes	Base URL for DOI redirect (e.g., https://nickthiru.dev)

Tech Stack

• Framework: SvelteKit
• Styling: TailwindCSS with Typography plugin
• Markdown: mdsvex
• Syntax Highlighting: Shiki
• Email: Brevo (Double Opt-In newsletter + welcome email, shared with thiru-ai-labs)
• Deployment: Vercel

Documentation

• Newsletter Subscription System — Brevo DOI flow, webhooks, env vars
• Route Structure — Site routing and pages
• Components Usage — Reusable Svelte components

License

Content is © Nick Thiru. Code is MIT licensed.