Where it all began

Why another blog?

First, I want to explain why I created this blog. I was heavily influenced by Fábio Akita’s post. Each post is meant to be a message to my future self, a reminder of every challenge I got past and every lesson I learned. After years working in the field, I miss having a place I can go back to and see what my work has produced.

Where am I going? Am I heading in the right direction? Have I learned everything I wanted to learn?

I’m creating this blog to answer those questions, especially now that I’ve finished college. I’m facing a lot of challenges, at work and in personal projects, and I want to document as much as I can. I also want to help other people who run into the same problems.

It’s also worth saying that I don’t have much writing experience. I need to get better at it, because writing is one of the skills that separate average professionals from exceptional ones.

How did I build it?

I built the whole blog with the Astro framework. It’s excellent for static pages like a blog. To publish a new post, I just create a .md file and that’s it. Everything is already set up: search indexing, tags and listing. The experience was very good and I didn’t run into any major problems. I originally had a portfolio project built with Astro to keep my résumé public, but I decided to replace it with this one. I think it makes more sense for where I am right now.

Theme

Speaking more about Astro, what surprised me most was the number of ready-made plugins, which sped up development a lot. All the design and the publish date formatting on this post come from the nordlys theme. With it, I didn’t have to worry about anything. Before that, I had tried to build everything from scratch, but customizing the CSS and setting up the layouts and tag pages was taking too much work, so I decided to make better use of my time. Once I found the wide range of themes available on the site, the choice got even easier.

Deploy

I chose to deploy on Vercel. With two clicks the site is live with analytics set up. And it’s free.