The Gratitude Stack: Powering Crosscurrent Code

Crosscurrent Code is a lean publishing stack rather than a sprawling app platform, and that is by design. This page is a short colophon for the tools, platforms, and communities that currently keep the site running.

Platform & Deployment

• Astro: The site framework behind the current build. Astro keeps the publishing flow fast, content-driven, and simple to reason about.
• Cloudflare: The site is deployed on Cloudflare’s edge platform with the Cloudflare adapter, so pages and assets are served close to the reader.
• Wrangler: The CLI that handles local development, type generation, previewing, and deployment to Cloudflare Workers.

Publishing & Content

• Markdown and MDX: The editorial core of the site. Posts and pages live as content files, which keeps the writing portable and easy to maintain.
• @astrojs/mdx: Adds MDX support where a post needs a little more than plain Markdown.
• Astro Content Collections: The structure that keeps frontmatter validated and routes predictable across posts and standalone pages.
• @astrojs/rss and @astrojs/sitemap: Handle the feed and sitemap so the site stays readable by both humans and crawlers.

Media & Build Pipeline

• Sharp: Used in the image pipeline to keep media optimized and web-friendly.
• Cloudflare Image Service: Helps Astro and Cloudflare cooperate on responsive image delivery in production.
• Hand-written CSS: The presentation layer is intentionally custom rather than framework-heavy, which keeps the visual system site-specific instead of template-shaped.

Workflow & Tooling

• Visual Studio Code: The editor where most of the writing, restructuring, and refactoring happens.
• GitHub: Source control, revision history, and the place where the project stays organized.
• GitHub Copilot: Used as an assistant for implementation, refactoring, and documentation work.
• pnpm: The package manager used to keep installs fast and dependency handling predictable.

The Foundation: Open Source & Community

Beyond any specific dependency, Crosscurrent Code depends on the wider open-source ecosystem: maintainers, contributors, bug reporters, documentation writers, and the people who keep the web usable through patient engineering work. This site is smaller than that ecosystem, but it benefits from it every day.

If this page is out of date, that is on us, not on the tools. The stack evolves, and the colophon should evolve with it.