Hello, world: how this blog is built

This is the first post on the Tysoft engineering blog. It exists to prove the pipeline works end to end before the real articles land — so it deliberately exercises every building block an article can use.

What an article is made of

Every post is an MDX file under src/content/blog/. The frontmatter is typed and validated at build time, so a missing title or a malformed publishDate fails the build with an actionable error instead of shipping broken.

Code blocks

Fenced code blocks get Shiki highlighting, a copy button, and an optional filename frame — just add a title:

import { defineCollection, z } from 'astro:content';
import { glob } from 'astro/loaders';

const blog = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.mdx', base: './src/content/blog' }),
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    publishDate: z.coerce.date(),
    tags: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
  }),
});

export const collections = { blog };

Inline code works too, and longer pieces get an automatic “On this page” table of contents from their headings.

The paired repo

Tool articles ship a standalone, MIT-licensed repo that extracts the pattern so you can use it without the surrounding product code:

That’s the whole chain: authored in MDX, validated, highlighted, measured for reading-time, tagged, and linked to its worked example. The real articles start next.