Rebuilding my personal website using Astro

This is the first post of my new blog (and personal website). I decided to build it using Astro, a little bit of React and Tailwind for the styling. It is hosted on Cloudflare pages.

I had been thinking about using Astro for some time but didn’t have a specific need for static page generation until now. My previous personal website was built with Jekyll and while it worked OK it meant choosing an all-static approach and (as a front-end engineer) I prefer to have the flexibility to use React components whenever I need them.

So far it has been a great experience. Lighthouse scores are almost 100 on every category and the developer experience has been like no other. Build times are much faster than Jekyll and the Astro templating system is quite intuitive and flexible.

The only issue that I had was during the deployment on Cloudflare pages, as I spent some time figuring out that my build was failing because of a React component that was not named in lowercase, which seems to be a requirement in their build environment.

I know that most developer blogs end up being a couple posts and then radio silence but I will do my best to actively post. I am currently reading “Writing for developers” by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop as part of Phil Eaton’s Book Club and it’s been a great resource.