It’s been a while

I think it’s been over a year since my last dev post and about a year since I last posted anything on this site. I’ve been working pretty nonstop and haven’t had time to do my own thing. But here we are, I found some time and wanted to have the first task be revamping my site (joking of course).

Okay, so I decided to go with something new easy, and streamlined, which I landed on Astro from a friend’s suggestion. Astro seemed to be a perfect fit for what I needed as the site is pretty simple and I didn’t need a lot of client-side interaction. So Astro’s thing is “Astro builds fast content sites, powerful web applications, dynamic server APIs, and everything in-between.” which is mostly buzzwords, but the real stand out came from the markdown support.

Astro excels at making it easy to structure static content and tries to move away from all the bloated tooling and libraries. It was a good time as Astro just came out with 3.0. Which gave some nice improvements and kind of had me sold at “Astro 3.0 is the first major web framework to support the View Transitions API”. This is kind of huge as it allows multi-page apps to have seamless animations between screens. So you can leverage SEO content while also feeling like a modern site.

They also release a “stable” image optimisation which is great and a huge reason I was using Next. This allows for faster image load times for the particular device requesting the image. So it doesn’t need to load massive high-quality images if it doesn’t need to.

Bun

So where do I start? To put it simply, I am just going to reuse the blogs and rebuild everything trying to just use pure HTML, CSS, and, TS inside Astro and only expand to react if absolutely necessary. But also why not try another new thing alongside Astro… “What could go wrong?” he said foreshadowing days of pain.

So yeah I want to use Bun, which is meant to be an “all-in-one toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript apps.” that is a drop-in replacement for node. But they only just released 1.0.0 and there are a fair amount of issues as you would expect. It seems straightforward and nice but finding it hard to use with some incompatibilities that keep popping up. Basically, it’s not quite there yet but I am gonna give it a go anyway.

Host

Finally gonna need somewhere to host it so will probably use Vercel again, which already finding issues as it doesn’t support Bun. But I digress I am sure it will at some stage and in the meantime bun can act as the package manager and my local builder, so we will see how we go.