NEEL RATNAn MDX-authored articles section for writing up the real work behind these case studies.
Overview
Decoder Labs is a lightweight, MDX-authored writing platform where the deeper technical narratives behind projects like GM Markets and YieldFi get written up properly — the decisions and tradeoffs a case study card doesn’t have room for.
Problem
The portfolio’s case studies are intentionally terse. Some of the more interesting engineering decisions — websocket state layers, optimistic UI reconciliation, splitting UI from server state — deserved a longer form that a project card couldn’t hold.
Architecture & Approach
Posts are authored as MDX with frontmatter for metadata, compiled at build time by Vite so there’s no CMS or runtime content fetch. The site is deployed as its own app and served under /articles through the same gateway that fronts the portfolio, keeping the two independently deployable while sharing one domain.
Metrics
Learnings
Writing up a decision forces a precision that shipping it never demanded. Keeping posts as MDX alongside code, instead of in a CMS, made them cheap enough to write that they actually got written.