zemnanet

How I Dissected 54 Design Systems and Transplanted Linear.app DNA Into My Hugo Blog in One Day

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0700

This morning I opened my blog and thought: this looks like a 2015 Tistory template. So I told my Hermes agent, in exactly these words: “This looks like garbage. Go through all 54 design systems and rebuild it with the best one.”

It did.

Why Linear.app Won Out of 54

The popular-web-designs skill in Hermes has templates for 54 real-world design systems — Stripe, Linear, Vercel, Notion, Figma, and 49 others. The agent loaded them all and surfaced five recommendations:

Colophon

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Colophon

This page documents the how of zemnanet — what the site is built with, what tools run it, and why those choices were made.

Stack

Layer	Tool	Why
Site generator	Hugo v0.140 extended	Go single binary, sub-second builds, no Node toolchain
Hosting	Cloudflare Pages	Free, global CDN, zemna.net already on Cloudflare
Domain	zemna.net on Cloudflare Registrar	Same provider, no extra DNS hops
Content	Markdown + Hugo frontmatter	Plain text, version-controlled, AI-friendly
Versioning	Git on GitHub	Public history, no vendor lock-in
Deployment	git push to `main` → Cloudflare Pages build	Zero-config CI; the only “ops” is git
Search	Pagefind (planned)	Static index, runs at build time, no JS framework

Typography

Inter for UI, navigation, and English headlines — open source, broad weight range, readable at small sizes.
Noto Serif KR for Korean editorial content — open source, designed for the Korean script.
JetBrains Mono for code — ligatures for => and !=, tabular numerals.

Colors

Three brand colors, derived from a synthesis of Korean hanji (off-white) and Indonesian batik (navy + vermilion). Full palette and semantic mappings live in the design system.

Design System

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

zemnanet Design System

A single source of truth for the visual and typographic language used across:

zemna.net (this website)
Blog posts and series
Social media graphics (IG carousels, X headers, podcast covers)
Any presentation, README, or tool that says “zemnanet” on it

The system is token-first — every visual decision is a named token. No hard-coded values in templates. No drift between surfaces.

Tokens

The token set lives in the theme source at themes/zemnanet-theme/assets/css/tokens.css. The production build publishes the minified CSS custom properties at /css/tokens.min.css.

The quiet consolidation in Korean dev tooling

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Korean developer-tools market has historically been fragmented. Dozens of small teams shipping one thing well, each with its own API, its own auth model, its own quirks. That era is ending.

In the last twelve months, three acquisitions have reshaped the landscape:

A messaging-platform SDK vendor absorbed by a larger payment provider — for the auth layer, not the messaging.
A monitoring vendor rolled up into a CI/CD platform. The monitoring product is now a feature flag.
A Korean-built serverless runtime was acquired by a Japanese cloud company. The runtime will continue to ship, but the SDKs now match the parent’s other products.

What this means for users

If you’re building on Korean dev tools, three practical changes are coming:

Stop reaching for a state library

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every JavaScript codebase I’ve touched in the last two years has had a state-management library somewhere in package.json. Most of them didn’t need one.

Here’s the test: does your state need to outlive a single function call? If the answer is “no” for 80% of your state, you don’t need a library. You need a function.

The pattern that replaces 90% of state libraries

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// store.js — 12 lines, no dependencies
const stores = new Map();

export function createStore(name, initial) {
 if (stores.has(name)) return stores.get(name);

 let value = initial;
 const subscribers = new Set();

 const store = {
 get: () => value,
 set: (next) => {
 value = typeof next === "function" ? next(value) : next;
 subscribers.forEach((fn) => fn(value));
 },
 subscribe: (fn) => {
 subscribers.add(fn);
 return () => subscribers.delete(fn);
 },
 };

 stores.set(name, store);
 return store;
}

That’s it. You get a shared, observable, type-safe-enough value holder. It works in any runtime. It works in tests. It works on the server.

The Indonesian developer scene is having its Linux moment

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been in Jakarta long enough to have watched the Indonesian tech scene go through three hype cycles. The current one is different — and more durable — because it’s not being driven by outside attention.

What’s happening

Five things that weren’t true five years ago:

A Bahasa Indonesia programming language has a working compiler, a small but committed user base, and a project that ships monthly.
A Go-based web framework designed for Indonesia’s specific deployment constraints (intermittent connectivity, low-end VMs) is being adopted in Vietnam and the Philippines, not just locally.
An Indonesian-led open-source database crossed 10K GitHub stars without ever being posted on Hacker News.
Local meetup culture is institutional. A “Tech in Bahasa” monthly event in Bandung has outlasted three major tech-industry layoffs.
Government adoption. The Indonesian Ministry of Communication has published open-source tools (in Bahasa) for internal use, and they’re being forked by local universities.

Why it matters

The pattern here is the same one that took Linux from “hobbyist kernel” to “everything runs on it”:

A pragmatic review of Hermes Agent after six months

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been running Hermes as my primary AI agent for about six months. This is a pragmatic review — not sponsored, not a teardown. Just notes from daily use.

What it is, and what it isn’t

Hermes is a personal AI agent. It runs locally, talks to a CLI, a Telegram bot, a Slack workspace, a TUI, and a desktop app — all from the same core. It has skills, memory, scheduled jobs, and the ability to spawn sub-agents.

Why I'm no longer worried about AI replacing senior developers

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a genre of LinkedIn post that goes: “AI will replace senior developers because seniors are slower, more expensive, and refuse to learn new tools.”

I have been watching this play out in actual engineering teams for two years. It is not what’s happening.

What the data actually shows

Three observations from teams I’ve worked with or observed closely:

AI tooling accelerates junior-to-mid transitions. A junior with good AI tooling can do mid-level work in a year instead of three. This is real, and it’s good.
AI tooling does not close the senior gap. A senior is not someone who writes code faster. A senior is someone who knows which code not to write, which abstractions to refuse, and which trade-offs are actually load-bearing for a specific business. AI doesn’t help with that. It actively makes it worse by making it cheap to write more code than the problem requires.
The most expensive failures are now AI-augmented failures. A junior with AI tooling can now ship a confidently-wrong architecture decision at a speed that previously required a senior’s review. The senior’s job has shifted: less “write the system,” more “stop the system from being written wrong.”

The frame that makes this make sense

The mistake is treating “senior” as a function of years. It’s not. Senior is a function of context. A senior developer carries an inarticulate, mostly-unwritten model of:

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi — I’m Shinjae Kang

A senior software developer based in Jakarta, Indonesia for the past 15 years.

I write here about IT, AI, and the developer tooling I use day to day, with a particular focus on the bridge between Korean tech and Southeast Asian tech — two ecosystems that move in similar ways but rarely talk to each other directly.

What this site is

A long-running personal blog (1 post per day, every day)
An English-first publication; the Korean mirror and Bahasa Indonesia mirror are auto-generated
A working lab for the zemnanet design system and the zemnanet content pipeline

What this site is not

A company blog. There’s no company.
A paid newsletter. No sponsors, no ads, no affiliate links.
A posting-everything firehose. Quality gates run on every post before it ships.

Where else to find me

X (Twitter) — @zemnanet
Instagram — @zemna
GitHub — zemna
Email — zemna@zemna.net

Disclosure

Some posts on this site are drafted with AI assistance. The text, opinions, code samples, and final edits are mine. When AI assistance is more than mechanical (e.g. it suggested a research direction), the post will say so in a note at the bottom.