Techno-Deism

An interactive companion website for the book Deities & Developers.

Role: Design, development and hosting
Year: 2026
Live site: technodeism.xb-labs.uk

pages prerendered: 29
automated browser tests: 160+
WCAG 2.2 accessibility: AA
cookies or trackers: 0

The brief

Deities & Developers by Michael Brennan describes human life through the language of software: hardware, syntax, bandwidth and operating systems. The site had to help two audiences: people deciding whether the book is for them, and readers who want a companion while they read.

Everything on it had to come from the book itself, with quotations checked word for word, and it had to work for everyone: on a 360px phone, with a keyboard or screen reader, with motion turned off, and even with JavaScript disabled.

What I built

An animated, clickable scene of the book’s seven-layer “stack”, built as an accessible tab interface that also works with the arrow keys
Guides to all eight chapters and pages for the six core frameworks, cross-linked to each other
A glossary of every term, with an instant filter and a link for each entry
Three practical tools and a printable pocket card, all running in the browser with nothing saved or sent
A book page with both editions, the cover and the author
A Display menu for light or dark theme, reduced motion and larger text, remembered on the device

Engineering highlights

Real HTML for every page
React Router 7 in library mode with a custom build step that prerenders every route to static HTML, so pages load instantly, read well in search results and work without JavaScript.
A strict security policy
No inline scripts or styles anywhere, so the Content Security Policy can stay at “default-src 'self'” with no exceptions, alongside the full set of security headers.
Accessibility tested on every change
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA. Over 160 automated browser tests run axe accessibility checks on every page, in both themes, at phone and desktop sizes, before each release.
Content checked against the manuscript
Unit tests read the book’s chapter files and stop a release if any quotation or list on the site drifts from the original text.
Private by design
No cookies, no analytics and no server-side storage. The tools keep answers in memory only, and the privacy notice and legal pages are written for UK law.
Lean, repeatable hosting
A small read-only container behind a shared Caddy reverse proxy on a Linux VPS, deployed with one script that runs every check, keeps the previous release for rollback and confirms a health check.