sych0net
sych0.net is my hobby site. It’s a BBS-themed home for project logs, vintage computing builds, hardware galleries, and ANSI art, built in Astro, set in IBM Plex Mono, and rendered in amber-on-black like a CRT terminal that never went to sleep. It’s also where the design language for this site came from.
what’s on it
- Project logs, long-form documentation of restorations and builds: a GRiDCASE 1520 brought back from the dead, a Compaq Portable 486c restoration, an ESP32 Wi-Fi modem built to plug into a Compaq’s enhanced options slot.
- Hardware gallery, an inventory of the machines and peripherals on the bench, photographed and annotated.
- Bulletin board, short sysop posts with BBS-board-name datacenter codes for vibes.
- ANSI art, classic scene art rendered with AnsiLove.js. A reminder that text-mode graphics had range.
- Photo archive + message wall + system news, the mainstream BBS information architecture, applied unironically.
why it’s here
A hobby site might seem out of place in a portfolio. Here's why it earns its spot:
- It’s where this site’s design language came from.
The phosphor-amber palette, the IBM Plex Mono typography, the 80-column
shell, the dashed rules, the
>bullets, the dmesg-style log stream behind the CRT cursor, all of it started on sychonet. This site is that same vocabulary, dialed back for a professional audience. - It’s shipped work, built on my own time. It’s a real, maintained site, not a screenshot in a deck: keyboard-shortcut navigation, a lightbox image viewer, a mobile “phone wall” easter egg, a custom Shiki theme. The kind of polish I bring to the day job, applied to something I do for fun.
- It shows range. The work I do on regulated-finance design systems and the work I do restoring old hardware come from the same instinct: take the thing seriously, understand how it’s built, and document it well.
how it’s built
Sychonet is intentionally simple infrastructure for a content-heavy site:
- Framework
- Astro 5 (static-site generation, zero JS by default)
- Type
- Self-hosted IBM Plex Mono, no third-party fonts
- Content
- MDX + Astro content collections, photos optimized with Sharp
- Theme
- Custom Shiki TextMate theme (sychonet.json), the same one this site uses for code blocks
- Layout
- 80-column shell, mobile refusal screen, lightbox image viewer
- Hosting
- GitHub Pages via Cloudflare Worker for asset rewriting
- Source
- github.com/k0bura/sychonet
design influences on this site
Direct lineage from sychonet to jeffmills.dev:
-
Amber-phosphor palette (
#ffcc00accent,#665200dim,#88cc88ok-green) and the dark#0e0e0ebackground. - IBM Plex Mono everywhere, same font face, same weights, self-hosted from the same woff2 files.
-
80-column shell, dashed-rule separators,
>bullets. - The CRT cursor + dmesg log stream on this site is sychonet’s aesthetic compressed into a single ambient effect.
- Custom Shiki theme for code blocks, amber keywords, green strings, blue functions, same palette across both sites.
Sychonet is the lab. This site is the production application.
Live: sych0.net · Source: github.com/k0bura/sychonet