~/onlyascii.dev$ onlyascii.dev

onlyascii.dev — a tech blog and profile

2026-07-01 · 2 min read

#Blog #Site-News

This is onlyascii.dev — my personal blog and profile. I’m Panos Xynos, a platform engineer and SRE. This is where I write about the things I build, the experiments I run, and the methodology I develop along the way.

The site shares the terminal/phosphor aesthetic of the OnlyASCII company site because it is the same brand. Same dark background, same phosphor green accent, same monospace discipline. The difference is purpose. onlyascii.io is the consultancy. onlyascii.dev is the workshop.

The Philosophical Developer

The main series on this blog is The Philosophical Developer — a collection of chapters that explore discipline in AI-assisted development. Each chapter is a real experiment with real code, real tests, and real outcomes. The repos are on GitHub with full trace tags.

The series spans multiple languages:

  • Chapters 00-06: Rust — weather-cli, mini-clap, task-tracker
  • Chapters 07-08: Go — afero bug fixes and formal process
  • Chapter 09: Python — tqdm, three bugs from the issue tracker
  • More to come

Between the main chapters you will find steering notes — shorter entries that show how the methodology develops, how I communicate intent to my padawan, and what the feedback loop looks like.

The stack

Both sites are built with Hugo and deployed on GitLab Pages. No frameworks, no JavaScript build step, no external dependencies. The CSS is hand-written, the layouts are minimal, and the whole thing compiles in under 30 milliseconds.

What to expect

  • Platform engineering and reliability deep dives
  • Cloud Foundry, BOSH, and infrastructure patterns
  • Rust, Go, and Python projects
  • The occasional ASCII game or unusual side project
  • Transparent documentation of experiments, including the failures

All code is on github.com/dark5un. All experiments have trace tags. Everything is verifiable.

How to follow

I am not doing newsletters. I am not spamming anyone. If you want to follow along, you can point your RSS reader at /index.xml. Remember RSS? Before all this social media madness took our attention spans away from us. It is still there. It still works. No algorithms, no tracking, no noise. Just the posts when they land.

Start with Chapter 00 if you want to understand where the series comes from.