[wip] how this blog came to be

I bought this domain more than five or six years ago for a personal website, portfolio, and blog. For most of that time, though, it was just a single-page site with a short “About Me” section that I barely ever updated.

After spending years consuming content on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and everywhere else, I realised that I was only consuming things and not creating or putting out anything of my own.

I wanted a place where I could simply write.

Maybe something I write will be useful. Maybe it will be funny. Maybe I’ll come back to it years later for the nostalgia. Maybe it will help me articulate my thoughts better and improve my writing skills. I don’t know—maybe it will do all of those things.

So one day, I finally decided to create this blog and start publishing.

I also own another domain where I plan to post mostly work-related and professional developer stuff. By “plan,” I mean I haven’t actually started doing that yet either, lmao.

That made me think: why not start with this site first?

Here, I can experiment, learn a few things, get my hands dirty, and figure out a workflow that works for me. Later, I can use what I learn here to publish more polished content on the professional site.

And that is more or less how this blog was born.

For this site, I wanted my personality to be reflected properly. I wanted it to feel like a mix of tech, nerd, and developer stuff, along with travel, solitude, nature, chaos, and all those kinds of experiences. I also want to write about my niche hobbies, such as PCs, mechanical keyboards, audiophile gear, music, and whatever else I happen to be interested in.

How I Built It

I had previously created a few blogs with Hugo—mostly the usual abandoned sites with a single “Hello World” post—so I already had some hands-on experience with static site generators.

The last time I used Hugo, I built the site using an existing theme, so naturally, my first thought was to use it again.

Then I came across Astro.

Astro is also a static site framework, but it felt more customisation-friendly for what I wanted to build. Since I was already planning to use coding LLM agents to help me, most changes would only take a few prompts or iterations to implement.

That made Astro feel like the better choice.

Hugo could probably do everything I needed too, but I wanted to take advantage of the TypeScript and JavaScript ecosystem instead of working with a combination of Go, JavaScript, and Hugo-specific tooling.

So, Astro it was.

these are field notes for now. i’ll keep adding to them as things come back to me, then turn them into a proper blog post later.