MAKING OF
THE DISPATCH
Everything has to be built by someone. Here's what SoloBuilt runs on, why those choices were made, and what it actually takes to publish this thing.
Typography
THE DISPATCH
Condensed sans-serif with variable weight axis. Used at
weights 600-700. Self-hosted via @fontsource-variable/oswald, no external font requests, no render-blocking.
Real workflows from a real corporate environment.
Clean geometric sans with variable weight axis. Used at 400-700. Also self-hosted. No Google Fonts, no external stylesheet requests anywhere on the site.
Tech stack
- Astro 6 Static site generator with Cloudflare Workers adapter. Pages are prerendered at build time. The API routes (contact form, subscribe endpoint) run as edge functions.
- Tailwind CSS v4 Utility-first CSS with custom design tokens defined in
theme.css. Every color, font, and spacing value runs through a named token. Nothing is hard-coded. - TypeScript Used throughout. API routes are fully typed. Component props use TypeScript interfaces.
- Cloudflare Workers Hosts and serves the site from Cloudflare's edge network. Deploys automatically when code is pushed to the main branch on GitHub.
- Cloudflare R2 Object storage for all site images, served via
images.solobuilt.ai. Images are uploaded separately from code deploys and never committed to the repository.
Publishing tools
- Kit Handles newsletter subscriptions and email delivery. The subscribe form on this site POSTs directly to Kit's API, no third-party embed, no iframe.
- GitHub Version control. Every change to the site is committed and pushed before it's live.
- GitHub Actions CI/CD. A push to
maintriggers an automated build and deploy to Cloudflare. No manual deploy steps required.
Built with AI
This site was designed and built by Wayne Foreman using Claude (Anthropic) as a development partner. Claude wrote code, drafted copy, made design decisions, and worked through problems in real time, the same way SoloBuilt content describes using AI in a corporate environment.
That's not a disclaimer. It's the point. The site is a demonstration of the thing it writes about.
Design decisions
The visual direction is typographic editorial brutalism. Typography is the design. No photography on the core pages, no illustration, no decorative icons. Square corners everywhere. One accent color used sparingly.
The reference point is print: broadsheets, dispatch publications, wire-service layouts. The content is modern; the structure is old. That tension is intentional.
The color palette has a name: Ink, Paper, Amber, Ash. Four colors. That's the whole system.
The editorial operation
One issue per week. Published Tuesdays, 6 a.m. ET. Written by Wayne Foreman, who also holds a full-time corporate job. Every workflow documented in the Dispatch was run in that job first.
No AI-generated workflows. No summarized content from other people's posts. No filler issues. If there's nothing worth documenting that week, the issue doesn't go out.