I Rebuilt My Site, So What?

It wasn’t broken. The portfolio that lived here did its job. I didn’t rebuild because the stack failed. I rebuilt because I wanted something different from the site.

I’ve had other sites. Looking back on my first blog, I see a junior developer trying to position himself (and wrestling with some impostor syndrome).

So what’s different now? Yes, impostor syndrome still lurks beneath the bed at night, but I’m not writing for approval anymore. I went from self-taught to Staff Engineer. I’ve done enough things right and enough things wrong. That’s worth sharing.

Some of it is about technical skill. A lot of it is navigating the industry, reading its trends, and learning that communication shapes as much as code does.

So it became a place to write. That’s the whole reason.

Picking Astro

I’d never used Astro. During my research, two things kept coming back: Astro and Hugo. The longer I’m in this field, the more I gravitate toward the simplest solution, and both fit. I went with Astro. If my name is on this site, I want to have made it: starting with the design, ending with the build.

What the site is, mostly by what it isn’t

The fastest way to describe the build is by what’s not in it.

No frontend framework. Astro ships plain HTML and CSS here. The only client-side JavaScript today is a copy-link button and the analytics script. No hydration, no router, nothing to bundle-split.

And yes, Astro is a framework. The difference is where it runs. Astro does its work at build time, then gets out of the way. React ships React to your browser with every page. Astro ships nothing of itself. The framework stayed on my machine.
No comments. Replies happen wherever you found the link. I’m not interested in moderating a database for a blog.
No CMS. Posts are MDX files in git. The editor is the editor.
Analytics, but on my terms. Umami, which doesn’t use cookies, so no consent banner. I serve the tracker script from my own origin instead of their CDN, and the data can move into my own Postgres later.
No third-party anything else. Fonts are bundled and self-served. No tracking pixels, no newsletter popup.

View source is the whole story.

This is the first post. The site does what I rebuilt it for.

No course, no blueprint. Just what I’m working through, written down while it’s still useful.