Hello, Oriz

This is the first post on blog.oriz.in. It might as well be the README for the blog itself, so let me start at the obvious place: what is Oriz?

Oriz is a single-developer open family of 17 npm packages and 26 web apps, built by Chirag Singhal over the last few years. The packages — @chirag127/astro-chrome, @chirag127/astro-data, @chirag127/omni-publish, and friends — are the load-bearing furniture. The apps — this blog, the hub, the photo journal, the books site, the packages catalog, and twenty-odd more — are what you can actually point at and use. Everything is source-available on GitHub, shipped to Cloudflare Pages on the free tier, and held together by a tiny set of conventions documented in AGENTS.md and knowledge/ bundles inside each repo.

So: why a blog?

Because the rest of the family is, by design, narrow. Each app does one thing — photos.oriz.in shows photos, books.oriz.in reviews books, the package READMEs document each package. None of those are the right place for the connective tissue: the engineering essays, the architecture decisions, the "here's why I rebuilt this from scratch", the monthly retros, the finance-in-India notes that don't fit anywhere else. That's what lives here.

You can expect roughly four kinds of post:

1. Engineering essays — Astro 6, Cloudflare Pages, content collections, the bits of the family that are interesting to talk about.
2. Architecture decisions — written-down ADRs for the patterns that recur across the 26 apps (knowledge-first, package-per-concern, the four-host git mirror).
3. Tutorials — practical "how I shipped X on the free tier in an afternoon" walkthroughs.
4. Monthly retros — what shipped, what broke, what got deferred.

If you want the firehose, subscribe via the Substack newsletter or follow the RSS feed (Atom and JSON Feed are at /atom.xml and /feed.json respectively — pick your favorite).

Embeds work here too

This blog is MDX, so posts can drop in components inline. Here's a YouTube embed:

And a fenced code block, rendered through astro-expressive-code:

console.log('hello, oriz')

Series

This post is part of the getting-started series — the running thread on how the Oriz family is put together. Head to /series/getting-started for the rest as it lands.

See you in the next post.