Designed placeholder card for About the Author: the title set in pale serif type over a dark blue-black gradient, headed ILLUSTRATION PENDING. No illustration for this entry exists yet.

About the Author

Dermot R. Cochran is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer based in Dublin, Ireland.

How this site is built

Fian Ilchruinne is a static site built with Eleventy. Content lives as Markdown and Nunjucks templates in this repository's src/ directory; npm run build runs Eleventy to compile it into the static _site/ output, npm run start serves it locally with live reload, and npm test runs an Eleventy dry-run build in CI on every pull request, alongside a ShellCheck pass over the deployment scripts.

How this site is written

The words on this site have been drafted and edited with the help of more than one tool over time, and the split is worth naming honestly. The early version of the site leaned on GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot for scaffolding and template work; some of the Codex's in-universe documentary passages were refined in Sudowrite. That last part became a problem once a Sudowrite draft and the committed file drifted out of sync and neither could be trusted as authoritative — so the repository is now the single source of truth, and everything reconciles to it. Claude Code does most of the current editing and organizing work directly against the repository, running the schema validation and dry-run build before anything is committed and helping keep the lore, Codex, glossary, and story bible consistent with each other. There's a fuller account of how that came to be in the Journal.

How this site is illustrated

The pictures are illustrations, not the work. Most are generated, some are made from the author's own photographs, and a few are those photographs as they stand; every one of them is recorded with what made it. Where a picture and an entry disagree, the entry is right. The author's photography has a home of its own at dermotcochran.com, and nothing made for this site goes there.

The engineering behind the record

Three of the author's public engineering projects ask, in code, the questions this story asks in fiction — and the resemblance is lineage, not coincidence. EPISTEME (swarm) is an epistemic architecture in which beliefs are explicit objects with confidence and lifecycle state, evidence is validated before it may influence them, and every revision is kept in an auditable history — the same discipline this site practices as its canon statuses, its Codex of sourced accounts, and its Survey Archive of reconciliation binders. Voting is a deterministic, invariant-preserving allocation engine whose creed — exact arithmetic, conservation asserted at every phase boundary, a loud stop preferred to a silent error — is also the creed of this repository's validators. And the Architecture Definition Model (ADM) is a framework for keeping the architecture of generative-AI systems explicit, human-owned, and auditable; the working agreement that governs how this site is written and reviewed is a live instance of it, and appears in that repository as a case study.

Fan fiction

Want to write your own stories in the Fian Ilchruinne universe? Post them on Archive of Our Own or Wattpad rather than here — tag them something like "Fian Ilchruinne (Dermot R. Cochran)" so other readers can find them, and feel free to link your work in the comments' Fan Creations category.

Translations count as fan works too. English is the canonical text, so a translation into another language is a derivative reading rather than authoritative canon — which makes it exactly the kind of non-commercial fan work the licence's Fan Works Policy welcomes, not something the main site can vouch for line by line. Post one the same way (AO3 or Wattpad, tagged and clearly marked an unofficial translation) and link it in the Fan Creations category so readers in that language can find it. One note for translators: the story's coined in-universe terms — names and technical vocabulary like Kieme — are canon as spelled, not ordinary words to render, so a faithful translation leaves them intact. For a casual read in another language, your browser's built-in translate feature works on every page — automatically, and just as unofficially.

Prefer to run your own site instead of posting to an existing platform? Fan fiction clones of this site are explicitly allowed and supported, non-commercially and clearly labeled as unofficial — see the Licence section's Fan Works Policy and the Forking This Site guide for how to fork this repository and reuse some or all of the existing content.

Noted. Fan works the site knows of and points at are listed on the licence's standing formula — referenced, not endorsed: a link is a pointer, not approval, and being listed here confers no official status. One is noted so far: tissadelleshepherd/star-rangers, a fan fork of this repository whose one addition is an uncaptioned, AI-generated picture of a red-haired woman walking a beach at sunset. Between the account's name and the likeness, the intent is plain enough — Tissadelle Shepherd, off duty — but the identification is the maker's, not the record's. In circulation, and noted.

How this site is deployed

Two deployments run from this repository. A GitHub Actions workflow builds the site with Eleventy on every push to main and publishes the result to GitHub Pages. Separately, cPanel-hosted clones of the site pull updates via cPanel's Git Version Control feature, driven by .cpanel.yml and scripts/cpanel-deploy.sh, which build the site with Eleventy and copy it into public_html. Each clone's identity — its palette, its wording, and whether it narrows the content to a subset — is resolved from a registry in the repository by domain name, so a clone's own untracked deploy.conf need only name the account and the domain. What that registry may hold is deliberately limited: it carries framing, never facts. The lore, the glossary and the chapters are identical on every domain, and a narrowed clone shows a subset of one record rather than a variant of it.