Where this engine grew up

Every feature on this site has a page that says what it does. Fewer say why it is there, and almost none say what the week before it existed was like. That part was written somewhere else: on sean.cz, the archive this engine was taken out of and the site every change lands on first — 6,655 posts going back to 2003. Until last week it was written in Czech only.

Since 7 October sean.cz reads in English as well: 126 posts, each the same post as its Czech original with the words in a second language, the way a second language works here. Among them is the whole series that follows this engine from the day the site moved onto it, The new Sean.cz: twenty-one parts so far, July to October.

A few places to start, if you want a sample rather than the whole run:

• How this blog is built — the shape of the whole thing in one post: JSON on disk, a Ruby build, static files, nothing listening.
• When changing one line of CSS means uploading six thousand files — the problem that ended, four releases later, in the incremental build described in How big it can get.
• Your browser does the searching, not my server — why search is a file the browser downloads.
• I couldn't run this from my phone — the question the writing page, and later the apps, came out of.
• ./blog.sh has learned to speak Czech — the week the second language arrived, seen from the author's desk.
• Four reviews and one sentence — four AI models asked to review 1.9, and the one thing they agreed on.
• Paper, ink and 76 kB extra — the current look, measured honestly, transfer cost included.

Two things to know before you click. These posts are a diary of building, not documentation: they say what broke on a Tuesday and what the fix cost, and the settled answer lives here, on this site. And they are written for the author's own readers, in the first person, with the emoticons he has used since 2003; the translation keeps all of that. Where a sean.cz post has no English yet, the English site shows the Czech one and says so — the same fallback this site uses in the other direction.