Yes, I had it all — Hugo did the thing. V0 whipped up a ridiculously slick site in seconds, like some kind of design wizard 🧙 on performance-enhancing drugs. Everyone could tell it was AI-generated… and yeah, that was kind of the problem (like with this sentence 😉). Looks aren’t everything — content is.

I wanted something easy. A system that doesn’t need a special binary, something that just works out of the box, and something I can extend with my existing web knowledge.

That’s why Astro clicked, and I hope it keeps clicking. It worked right out of the box, and I can extend it however I want. If I feel like getting fancy, I can drop in a Svelte or React component — no problem. I already know those. Astro gives me the kind of flexibility I want for a project like my personal site — which, best case, I’ll never have to restart again. And since all my blogs are written in Markdown (or MDX), it’s a perfect fit. My second brain lives in Markdown, too. Second Brain 🧠, such a fancy name… my notes 📝.

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Learnings

• There’s no shame in deleting a whole repo on GitHub and starting over. Fresh starts feel good.
• The JS ecosystem is wild, but once you’re familiar, it’s easy to navigate. Downloading a binary just for static site generation feels bad… but installing 400 Node modules? Feels fine somehow. 🤷‍♂️
• Astro’s content-first architecture is exactly what you want for a blog or technical documentation. If I had to write docs today, I’d use Astro — or something built into a language, like rustdoc.

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What’s Next?

• Figure out how these islands 🏝️ work and how to build them.
• Refine the blog. It’s responsive, has a header and footer — that’s enough for now. Dark mode would be nice, but light mode works fine.
• Sort blogs by tags could be a nice feature to add. 🏷️
• Fill the blog with actual content. ✏️
• Add to this blog when I’m done with making a personal site in Astro for my whole family. 😅