tech

Migrating to Astro

It’s been a long time coming (also — HELLO! I haven’t posted in ages). I’ve been running this blog on Jekyll since 2018. It served me well — simple, reliable, and static. But as the years went by, the Ruby environment management and the limitations of Liquid templates started to feel a bit dated compared to the modern JavaScript ecosystem I read and hear about daily.

After some research, I decided to take the plunge and migrate everything to Astro. LLM agents made this basically effortless — I was able to describe what I wanted, review the outputs, learn from them, and ship stuff very quickly.

Why Astro?

I wanted something that felt modern but didn’t sacrifice the performance benefits of a static site. Astro was the perfect fit for a few reasons:

  1. Zero JavaScript by Default: Astro ships HTML. It only hydrates the interactive parts of the page if you explicitly tell it to. This keeps the site incredibly fast.
  2. Component-Based Architecture: Being able to build reusable UI components (like my Header, Footer, and Skill cards) is a breath of fresh air compared to partials and includes. My mobile skillsets transfer over just fine.
  3. Markdown & MDX Support: I can still write my posts in Markdown (or MDX if I need components inside my posts), which made migrating my existing content relatively painless.

The New Stack

cheeyi/cheeyi.github.io

The source code for this website. Built with Astro, hosted on GitHub Pages.

The new setup is pretty streamlined:

  • Framework: Astro 5.0
  • Hosting: GitHub Pages (still the best place for a dev portfolio, IMO)
  • Styling: Custom CSS (keeping it lightweight)
  • Content: MDX for blog posts

How it Works

One of the coolest things about Astro is the .astro file format. It allows you to write the JavaScript logic that runs at build time right alongside the HTML template.

---
// This runs at build time!
const title = "My Awesome Blog Post";
---

<h1>{title}</h1>
<p>This HTML is generated statically.</p>

It feels like a perfect blend of static site generation and modern component ergonomics.

Looking Ahead

The migration set up a foundation that makes it easier (and more fun) to write and ship new posts. I’m excited to explore more of what Astro can do down the road, too!

Here’s to the next 7 years! 🚀 (I’m lazy!)