blust.ch

Robert Blust's profile page and two talks. Self-contained, no build step, no external assets. Working conventions and the traps that break this site silently are in CLAUDE.md.

Pages

/ profile page — thesis, talks teaser, links
/talks/ talks index — the descriptions live here
/talks/mental-model/ deck: The Mental Model
/talks/essential-complexity/ deck: Essential Complexity

The profile page and the talks index deliberately list the same two talks: the profile page carries a one-line teaser (title, length, language, link), the talks index carries the description. Editing a talk means checking both files — see CLAUDE.md.

Each deck is bilingual (German content, English via data-en), self-contained, and works from file:// as well as a local server.

Commands

npm install && npx playwright install chromium
npm run serve # python3 -m http.server 8000
npm run verify # Playwright DOM assertions against all four pages, plus the sitemap
npm run og # regenerate the four 1200×630 og:image share cards
npm run pdf # regenerate both decks' PDF fallbacks
./tts/generate.py --dry-run # narration: what would be billed, and for which slides
./tts/generate.py # narration: generate what changed, both decks

Run npm run verify after any change under index.html, talks/, or verify/. Run npm run og and npm run pdf after a visual change to either deck or to index.html / talks/index.html — the share cards and PDFs are rendered, committed files, not generated on demand.

Narration is generated from the speaker notes themselves and cached on a content hash, so editing one note regenerates one clip. It needs ELEVENLABS_API_KEY, which lives in ~/.zshrc and is therefore invisible to a non-interactive shell — CLAUDE.md has the one-liner that reaches it, and the rule about never printing it.

Migration history — read before deleting the source repositories

The two decks were brought into this repository with their git history intact, as subtree merges. The cut-over runbook's own draft says to confirm this with:

git log --oneline -- talks/mental-model/

That command proves nothing.git log with a path filter does not follow history across a subtree merge commit — it shows only the merge itself, not what was merged in, regardless of whether the history is actually there. A clean-looking one-line result from that command is not evidence of anything.

An earlier draft of this runbook recommended git cat-file -e <sha> against this local repository instead. That is not sufficient, and must not be reinstated.cat-file -e only proves an object is reachable from local refs on this disk — it says nothing about whether it survives. git remote -v here is currently empty: nothing has ever been pushed anywhere. A local object passing cat-file -e is fully consistent with that history existing on exactly one machine — the one about to have its only other copies, the two source repositories, deleted. Since that deletion is irreversible, a gate that can pass while the history has a single point of failure is worse than no gate.

The check that actually protects against the deletion requires two steps, in order:

1. Push this repository to GitHub first. Until origin exists and this history is on it, there is no second copy to verify against — only local objects that would die with this disk.

2. Verify against the pushed remote, not local HEAD and not local objects:

   git fetch origin
   git merge-base --is-ancestor 0b5acb75e48d2a8ad7132fd1b4abc15bf20dc6ea origin/main
   git merge-base --is-ancestor 77757acea99102d128916e305d9f59e81610d08b origin/main

Both commands must exit 0. --is-ancestor against origin/main confirms each source repository's original tip commit is not merely present somewhere but actually reachable from the branch GitHub is serving — which is what has to be true for the history to be recoverable once the source repositories are gone. Run both, against the remote, only after pushing, before deleting robertblust/mental-model or robertblust/essential-complexity on GitHub.

Process

• Commits happen when the user asks; suggest a message, don't auto-commit.
• Never mention closed-source predecessor projects — here, in docs, or in commits.