Skip to content

PRODUCT.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
58 lines (38 loc) · 4.5 KB

PRODUCT.md

File metadata and controls

58 lines (38 loc) · 4.5 KB
Raw

Product

Platform

web

Users

The primary visitor is a potential collaborator or client: someone from a neuroscience lab, funder, or organization evaluating Ben (and by extension CatalystNeuro) for consulting, collaboration, or grant work. A successful visit leaves them confident in Ben's track record and gives them a clear path to reach out or continue to catalystneuro.com.

Secondary audiences reached by the same content: academic peers verifying publications and talks, readers arriving at individual blog posts from external links, and people curious about Ben's side projects.

Product Purpose

bendichter.com is Ben Dichter's personal site: his professional identity, research record (publications, talks), blog, and side projects in one place. Success means a visitor quickly understands who Ben is and what he has done, and can verify it through real artifacts (papers, videos, working software).

Positioning

This site is Ben the individual, not the company. Company-level marketing lives at catalystneuro.com; this site links out to it rather than duplicating it. The software page deliberately excludes the neuroscience work for the same reason (recorded in src/data/site.ts). What this site can claim that no neighboring site can: the first-person record of one person's work across research software, publications, talks, and personal apps.

Operating Context

  • Content types: blog posts and talks as markdown content collections (src/content/), publications fetched by script into src/data/publications.json (with manual additions in publications-extra.json), side projects and drone videos as typed data in src/data/site.ts.
  • Publications update via npm run publications; thumbnails and icons have similar scripts. Social cards are generated per post and per talk at build time (satori + resvg).
  • Deployed to GitHub Pages through a GitHub Actions workflow that pushes the build to gh-pages; the master branch is the source of truth and pushes go live automatically. Pull requests get previews at /pr-preview/pr-<number>/ on the same branch.

Capabilities and Constraints

  • Astro 7 static site, Node >= 22.12. npm run dev for local dev, npm run build runs a build plus an output check script.
  • Ships no runtime JavaScript on the software page by design (stars and language chips are hand-written rather than fetched, so the build does not depend on the GitHub API).
  • Old Jekyll-era URLs are preserved through redirects in astro.config.mjs and directory-style URLs; inbound links to old permalinks resolve.
  • The user stated there are no strong durable constraints beyond keeping the content itself; the stack is open to change if a future redesign warrants it.

Brand Commitments

  • Name: "Ben Dichter" (site title), "Dr. Benjamin Dichter" (formal name). Domain bendichter.com.
  • Avatar public/images/profile.jpeg, with a circle-cropped favicon derived from it.
  • Voice: measured, plain, first person, honest and non-promotional (see the user's global writing-voice instructions; site copy already follows it).
  • Identity anchors: Research Software Engineer, Founder of CatalystNeuro, work on data standards (NWB) and open source tools for neuroscience.

Evidence on Hand

  • Real publications 2014 to 2025 in src/data/publications.json, refreshed by script, with author lists in src/data/publication-authors.json.
  • Real talks with YouTube recordings and thumbnails (src/content/talks/, src/assets/talks/).
  • Ten blog posts 2018 to 2026 (src/content/posts/), including matplotlib tooling posts and project announcements.
  • Working side projects with live URLs: westie.wiki, Invisible String, ReachMyReps, brokenaxes (573 GitHub stars, hand-recorded), and others in src/data/site.ts.
  • Drone footage YouTube channel, curated list in src/data/site.ts.
  • Do not fabricate: testimonials, client names, download counts, or metrics beyond what the data files record.

Product Principles

  1. Evidence over claims: every assertion on the site should be backed by a linked artifact (paper, video, repo, live app).
  2. Personal scope: company material belongs to catalystneuro.com; this site links, it does not duplicate.
  3. Content as data: publications, projects, and talks live in typed data files and content collections so pages never drift from their source.
  4. Fast and quiet: static output, minimal or no runtime JavaScript, no third-party trackers required for the site to do its job.
  5. Preserve inbound links: old URLs keep resolving through redirects when structure changes.