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What This Site Is

eriknorris.com is the public view of my engineering record. It is a portfolio, but not a stack of case studies assembled from memory. The project pages are rendered from a larger body of source material: notebooks, CAD, engineering change orders, test reports, photographs, correspondence, and program documents.

The portfolio is also one of the projects. Its design, source model, generators, validation, and failure history are part of the work being shown.

Source

The raw evidence lives outside the website in a content-hashed archive. Files can be converted, transcribed, catalogued, and deduplicated, but the archive itself is not silently rewritten to make a cleaner story.

That boundary matters. A polished page is useful only if its claims can still be traced to the work that produced them.

Canon

Each project is curated into a canonical Markdown record. Canon is the source of truth for project knowledge. The site, résumé, and other public surfaces are projections from it.

Machine assistance helps retrieve and organize evidence. Interpretation remains mine. Confidential material stays behind its publication gate; public claims must be supportable without exposing client information.

Build

A generator projects canon into the portfolio content files. The build checks that the projection is lossless and repeatable:

1. Canon is transformed into the site’s project schema.
2. A round-trip comparison checks that required fields and claims survive the transformation.
3. A second generation checks that the same source produces the same output.
4. The site build rejects known leakage patterns, unresolved placeholders, and schema failures.

The website is a read-only render target. A project page should not become a second, hand-maintained source of truth.

Public Render

Astro compiles the record into static HTML for people and into machine-readable surfaces for software. The page remains the primary public artifact. Other views can help a reader navigate the collection, but they do not replace the project record.

The authored article template carries a provenance note back to this explanation. That note does not prove every claim by itself. It states where authority lives and how the public page was produced.

What Failed

Earlier versions of the pipeline allowed raw interrogation material to reach public project pages. Prompts, transcript fragments, and unfinished analysis appeared where authored narrative belonged.

The correction was structural:

• source evidence and authored prose were separated;
• a finished-page contract defined what a public project record must contain;
• leakage and placeholder checks became build failures;
• normalization was run against the collection rather than hiding the affected pages.

The git history retains both the defect and the correction. A system built around provenance should preserve its own failure record.

Why Build It

A long engineering career does not fit cleanly into a résumé, and a résumé cannot carry the evidence behind its claims. This system keeps the underlying record durable, makes selected work legible, and lets the public surface evolve without becoming the authority.

That is eriknorris.com: a public engineering record, a portfolio, and a working example of how I build systems around real constraints.