Hello World

A first post for a brand new blog!

This is a brand-new look to my personal site. The first version of this site consisted of a true frontend and backend component.

I created the original version when I only had about a year of professional experience. I thought, “let me show them what I know how to do”, but now I’m at the point where I’ve realized that something simpler is better. You really don’t need to over-engineer your personal projects. All I really need is a static site and that’s about it. No fiddling with a custom GitHub Action to push a new blog post to a database necessary.

I decided to choose Astro to rewrite this in. I usually have a tough time making a decision between a lot of options (such a great idea to be in a world where there’s a new framework every week, right?) and end up succumbing to my analysis paralysis. My wife wanted to remake her own resume site and did some reading on Astro which inspired me to spruce mine up a bit. After a few nights of reading and going back and forth between how I wanted to redo it, I said “I’m just gonna use Astro, I don’t really care about what special things other frameworks do when I’m not going to use 90% of them.”

So, in the end, this was mostly practice fighting against my analysis paralysis. Another motivation was to quit paying so much for web hosting for an extra ~hundred or so in my pocket a year. Is that a win? Yeah, just a small one. But that’s still something to be proud about.