atassis.ru · writing · draft

Why this site looks like this

Most engineers’ personal sites fail in one of two ways. I tried to avoid both by building this one the way I build systems: state less, prove more, make the structure visible.

Either they shout — “passionate, results-driven, world-class” — adjectives no one can check. Or they’re a beige résumé that could belong to anyone. I wanted neither.

Verify, don’t assert

The thing I actually do for a living is distrust the happy path. I don’t take the compiler’s word that the output is correct — I check it against a benchmark, a gold-set, a byte-identical diff. So this site doesn’t ask you to take my word either. Every claim carries its receipt: a number, a merged-PR link, a commit. “16 models on Linux where AMD’s own stack runs zero” is a sentence you can click and verify, not a line you have to believe. If I can’t substantiate something, it doesn’t get the checkmark.

That single idea — open a claim and see its proof — is the spine of the whole site. It’s the most honest thing I can put on a page, because it’s the same move I make in code.

Invisible craft over visible effort

Before designing anything I read what the technical crowd actually praises — and, more usefully, what it mocks. The pattern is brutal and clear: people reward invisible craft (typography, speed, restraint) and ridicule visible effort (intro loaders, particle backgrounds, custom cursors, scroll-jacking, the obligatory “terminal typing” intro). Anything that announces “look what I animated” reads as insecurity.

So the aesthetic here is deliberately quiet: warm paper, near-monochrome, one earthy accent, almost no motion. The few moving parts are functional, not decorative. The goal is that nothing looks like it’s trying — which, of course, takes the most trying.

A real type system, not vibes

The part I enjoyed most. Good layout isn’t about picking a nice font; it’s about relationships, and relationships should come from a system, not from nudging pixels until it “looks right.”

Everything here derives from a few decisions: a modular type scale(every size is the base times a fixed ratio), a vertical rhythm (all spacing is a whole multiple of one baseline unit, so text sits on an invisible grid), one spacing scale shared by horizontal and vertical gaps, and a comfortable measure for reading. These live as design tokens — change the base or the ratio in one place and the whole site re-proportions itself, coherently.

While building it I kept a grid overlay I could toggle on — baseline lines and columns drawn over the page — to check that things actually land on the grid instead of merely looking close. Seeing the rigor is half of getting it right.

Two sides on one page

I write systems, and I write verse. Most advice says to hide the second thing — keep it “professional.” I think that’s the wrong instinct for the people I want to work with: a real, multidimensional person beats a résumé avatar. So the poetry is here, in Russian, on its own narrower measure and its own serif, so it breathes differently than the engineering.

And the “open it and see the proof” idea extends naturally: a claim opens to its receipt; a poem can open to its structure — its meter, an earlier draft of a line. Same gesture, two materials. It’s the one thing here that only an engineer who is also a poet could have made.

Where it lives

Static site, built with Astro, served from GitHub Pages. It never touches my own servers — my homelab runs my services; my public face shouldn’t be a door into them. It loads fast, works without JavaScript for everything that matters, and degrades gracefully where a browser is old.

✓ this page is the first receipt — a site that explains how it was built.