Why?

I’ve had this idea for a while, like many junior developers probably do, to create a personal blog. A space not only to share my work with others but also to showcase my skills.

It feels almost like a rite of passage in the journey to becoming a well-rounded developer. I wanted a place where I could document my projects and progress over the years, and hopefully maintain a semi-consistent posting schedule.

After finally finding some time to decide how I wanted to build this simple blog, I got started.

How?

I noticed a lot of buzz around using Astro for static or blog-like websites, which is what drew me to it. If you’ve ever used Astro with a template, you might have already recognized that this site was built using the blog template (at least as of the time this article is published).

Several things about Astro made me choose it over other frameworks. One key factor is its flexibility—I’m not locked into React, and I have the option to explore different templates. Or, if I’m feeling adventurous, I can stick with plain old HTML. Another aspect that attracted me is Astro’s focus on performance. While performance isn’t a major concern for the simple content on my site right now, it positions me well to work on more advanced features in the future without worrying about performance issues.

For deployment, I decided to use AWS Amplify. Initially, my plan was to stick with the standard S3 + CloudFront setup, deploying with a simple command like:

aws s3 sync .....

And there was also documentation for linking it up to a GitHub repository and syncing it automatically. But what led me to using Amplify was its dead simplicty. It was literally just link to GitHub repo, deploy site. I then grabbed a custom domain name using Route 53 and just as easily linked it to Amplify.

All of which would have been pretty straight forward the manual way but since I believed I already understood what would go into created it like that I felt comfortable using the simplifed way. This leads me into some weird comprimises in my brain I had to make. I like to sometimes go the route where I am given more control. I didn’t want to use just any website hosting platform, I wanted to own the resources.

Using Amplify kind of meets in the middle of me owning the resources but adds the speed of development. In the future this may change if I want to introduce more dynamic content.

Plans for the Future

I would love to do a total overhaul on the style of this website and make it more personal. I really just used the default blog template and although it gets the job done, I want it to reflect my personality.

Thank you for reading this short post, if you need to get a hold of me my Twitter/X links are at the header and footer of this website!