git commit -m "initial post"

The story so far

The site has been sitting untouched for a while. It began in 2017 as a simple Jekyll blog. About a year later, I discovered React and promised myself I’d migrate to it, but the migration kept slipping through the cracks. When I finally found the time, three years on, I rebuilt it in Angular instead. The old version is still up.

Then I stumbled onto Astro. It felt familiar coming from React and Jekyll, and writing posts stayed refreshingly simple: create a Markdown file, add some metadata, write, and publish.

Thanks to a theme called Astro Palette, I finally have a working prototype. On top of that, it’s easily customizable.

What I like about Astro

Full disclosure: I’m not trying to hype up Astro here. I was looking for something that ticked most of the items on my checklist, and it happened to be the one.

I’ve been comfortable with writing content using Markdown for a while now. With that supported, I don’t need to learn a new markup language that has a steep learning curve. On top of that, updating metadata like date, description, and tags is fairly straightforward.

Astro comes with file-based routing out of the box, which means that the URLs are based on the project’s directory structure. Unlike other frameworks where there’s a separate configuration layer for managing URL mappings, Astro doesn’t need one. This degree of intuitiveness lets you focus on other aspects like writing content or redesigning your site.

On using artificial intelligence

With AI-assisted coding becoming more common, it’s easy to fall into the temptation of having tools like Claude generate almost 100% of the content for you. In this project, I’m trying to do my best not to fully rely on AI. Doing so will suck the life out of this site. I must admit that when I was first introduced to tools like these—Copilot, Cursor, and now Claude—I was amazed. My mindset was that I paid a premium for these subscriptions, so I must utilize 100% of them.

Everything seemed to be fine until I realized something over the years. I became so dependent on AI that it does all of the thinking now. It’s no different from what I used to do almost a decade ago: search Google, click a page like Stack Overflow, and blindly copy and paste snippets into my code editor. Same thing, different font.

What’s next?

The site’s code is open source, and you can see in the repository that it has Claude-related files. However, I intend to only use them occasionally in situations like coming up with a commit message or opening a new PR. When writing posts, I’ll lean on them sparingly in instances where I need the grammar and cohesiveness of my content checked.

Expect frequent tweaks to the design over the coming weeks, along with more posts.