Site Inception: GitHub Pages, Astro, and a Notebook Publishing Trail

Published 5 April 2026

Status: Site Updates Business: Product and Delivery Technical: Data Engineering Pipelines
site-engineering astro github-actions publishing-pipeline

My personal site is live at zhittsova.com. I wanted one place for my technical writing, notebook notes and case studies, with a publishing process I can keep using between projects.

I started with notebook posts from the agri-weather-yield-drivers project. You can open the source notebooks, check the validation notes and see what each result is useful for.

The site runs on Astro 6, with MDX content collections and a static build on GitHub Pages. I use Tailwind CSS 4 for styling, and React islands with Radix UI where a page needs interaction.

I also plan to add infographics, live charts, slide decks and more case studies where I can share the material and explain its evidence. A crude oil energy analytics project is in progress too. Its context changes more quickly, so I want to be careful about what each analysis can say at the time I publish it.

You can find the notebooks and projects on my GitHub. The notebook repos support Binder and Google Colab, with DuckDB as a small data mart. I’d like to share more of the dbt setup and ETL pipelines behind that work as well.

The case studies describe past work experience. The projects are separate work outside employer constraints, or material I have permission to share.

Status: Site Updates Business lane: Product & Delivery Technical lane: Reproducible Data Pipelines

Release position.

I publish the notebooks incrementally so I can check reruns and claims before each post goes live.

Stack
Astro 6, MDX, React islands, Tailwind 4, Radix UI
Build target
Static site generation with schema-validated content collections
Primary audience
Data scientists, hiring managers, product leaders, and technical reviewers

Build and deploy flow

  • Content lives under src/content/* and is .
  • CI runs typecheck, tests, and build.
  • A GitHub Actions workflow publishes generated static output to GitHub Pages.

I run the same checks locally and in CI. Before pushing, I use npm run typecheck, npm test and npm run build. A Makefile and pre-commit hooks help keep that routine consistent.

Publishing the notebook series

Notebook work from agri-weather-yield-drivers is being published here as a blog post series:

  • one post per notebook
  • a short explanation of scope, result, and what is still uncertain
  • direct GitHub, Binder, and Colab links via notebook preview cards
  • incremental release, with time to explain data gaps and imputation choices
Published notebook posts in current release wave: 42%

What is next

  • Section and category landing pages for easier navigation
  • More notebook writeups once release checks are complete
  • More case studies from previous work experience, linked back to the data work where that is useful
  • Smaller updates while the project context is still fresh

I want you to be able to follow the explanation and inspect the work behind it.

- Portfolio site guiding principle

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