· 4 min read Czytaj po polsku ↗

Colophon — notes on this site

This site has two addresses and one soul.

Type simondziak.com and you’ll land on the English version. Type szymondziak.com and you’ll land on the Polish one. Same content, same voice, different accent — both literally and chromatically.

Why two

My passport has one name. My family has another. Szymon is the Polish form, Simon is what Americans end up calling me after two tries. I grew up bouncing between both, and for a long time my websites and profiles had to pick a side. This one doesn’t.

The domain you type decides the default language and the accent color. Cyan for English, amber for Polish. The logotype always reads Simon⁄Szymon Dziak — the active half lit up, the other half ghosted — so whichever version you’re on, the other one’s visible just underneath. Flip between them with the EN/PL toggle.

Both domains are indexed independently on Google. hreflang tells search engines they’re translations of each other, not duplicates. If you find me in English and share the link, a Polish friend can click it and read the same page in their language — same slug, same images, different words.

Stack

Astro 5 for the framework. Tailwind v4 via @tailwindcss/vite for styling (with a CLI pre-compile step because the Astro integration didn’t cooperate). MDX for writing. Firebase Hosting for serving — one Firebase project, two Hosting sites, each built with a different SITE_LOCALE env var. Both builds come from the same source; the only difference is which language’s content subtree gets loaded.

A pre-build script symlinks src/pages to src/sites/<locale>/pages so each deploy only emits the routes that make sense for that domain. English gets /projects, /writing, /now, /about. Polish gets /projekty, /pisanie, /teraz, /o-mnie. No /en/ or /pl/ URL prefixes — each domain is monolingual in its canonical form, and the toggle is a genuine cross-domain navigation.

Design

Dev-craft minimalism, in the rauno.me / paco.me / leerob.io lineage. Dark base (#0a0a0a), monospace for accents, Inter for body, everything sized in the text-rhythm rather than pixel round-numbers. The only chromatic motif is the accent: cyan on English, amber on Polish. Small things: the footer strip spells out · s · z · c · l · on EN and · ś · ż · ć · ł · on PL. The 404 page hides a huge S (or Ś) in the background. Press the ~ key anywhere on EN and the body text briefly blooms its Polish diacritics.

Colors I keep

  • Base #0a0a0a
  • Ink #e8e8e8, muted #999, dim #666
  • Rule #1f1f1f
  • Accent EN #7dd3fc (cyan)
  • Accent PL #ffd166 (amber)

That’s it. No other chromatic noise.