Colophon

Designed and coded by Taylor Davidson. Built with Next.js and Tailwind, with a lot of help from Cursor and Claude Code. The site's own argument is that you should start from a proven structure and edit it with AI, and that is how the site is built too. The structure and the decisions are mine. A lot of the line-level code was written with an AI in the loop, and all of it was read before it shipped.

History

I have built my own websites since 1998. This one started in 2015 as a side project selling a single financial model template, and it has moved from static HTML to Statamic to Eleventy and now a custom Next.js app, across domains from unstructuredventures.com to buildforesight.com to foresight.is to hemrock.com. Each move kept the content and rebuilt the shell. A few hundred redirects still carry visitors from URLs that were last current a decade ago.

Design inspiration comes from European ecommerce, photography portfolios, and the ongoing question of how to mix commerce with personality, mystery, and a bit of fun.

The stack

The public site is a Next.js app. Products, docs, posts and workshops are markdown files in a git repository, with product prices and metadata in a typed data file, so a change is a commit and a deploy. Every page has a raw markdown twin at the same URL with .md appended, and an index at /llms.txt, because the AI assistants people use to read documentation prefer text to HTML.

Accounts, purchases and downloads run on Supabase. Sign-in is by email code rather than magic link, since links break when the email is opened on a different device than the one that asked for it. Checkout is Stripe or PayPal, and purchases made on Gumroad before 2026 are matched to accounts by email so the old library and the new one meet in one dashboard. Transactional email goes out through Resend. Site search is Pagefind, built at deploy time, so it works without a search server.

The Ask AI sidebar on every page is built on Claude. It reads the page you're on and the docs, and the same answers are available through an MCP server for people who'd rather ask from their own tools. Details at /docs/ai and /mcp.

The portfolio reporting software for fund managers is open source, and lives in its own repository at portfolio.hemrock.com.

Design

One typeface, Inter. One accent colour, an evergreen, used on the buttons that matter and almost nowhere else. Warm-tinted neutrals rather than pure grey, so the page reads as paper rather than a screen. Numbers are set in tabular figures so columns of money line up. Corners round to eight pixels at most, and nothing casts a shadow unless it floats above the page. A small test suite enforces these rules on every test run, because a convention nothing enforces is a convention that decays.

Icons from Lucide. Photos and screenshots are taken by me unless credited otherwise.

Older purchases

Older course and template purchases are still available on their original platforms, Gumroad and Maven. New purchases are on Hemrock, with an account system that also gives access to products originally purchased through Gumroad. See Support for details.