How this site is built

The site is part of the argument the writing makes, so it is worth saying how it works.

SvelteKit, prerendered to static files, served from a CDN. There is no server, so there is nothing to cold-start and nothing to patch. Papers are markdown files: publishing one is writing a file, committing, and pushing.

Four gates run before anything deploys. One fails the build if a client name that should never be public appears anywhere in the output; it works from hashes, so the names it protects are not themselves stored in this repository. One fails if anything still marked a draft reached the output. One checks spelling against American usage. One fails if a stylesheet refers to a design token that is not defined anywhere, or defines one in terms of itself. That last case is why it exists: a bulk edit once produced a token defined as itself, which is invalid in a way browsers do not report, so the footer rendered navy text on near-black and stayed readable only in the stylesheet. It shipped, and it was found on a phone. All four fail the build rather than filing a warning, on the principle that a gate which only ever passes is not a gate.

The palette and type are the brand's own: Source Serif for headings, Source Sans for running text, Source Code for anything that reports a value. The fonts are served from this origin rather than from a font host, because a stylesheet loaded from somewhere else hands that somewhere else the address of everyone who visits.

Ownership and reuse

The field notes are written by Scott Rooke and published by 494 Group, Inc. They describe the independent practice of this company: work done on its own engagements, with its own tools, and written up here. Copyright is asserted on all of it, and each note carries the date it was first published. The repository behind this site records the same dates in its history.

Quoting is welcome and needs no permission. Take a couple of hundred words, name the author, and link to the note you took them from. That covers the ordinary cases: citing an argument, arguing with one, passing a section to a colleague, or quoting a note in something you are writing yourself.

Beyond that, ask. Reproducing a note in full, translating one, publishing one inside a newsletter or a course, or using the writing to train a model are all reserved, and the answer to the first three is usually yes. info@494group.com.