Heya, starting off with the first blog post for an introduction and my thought on Astro as I rewritten the site. First and foremost, welcome to my personal website. This will be where I’ll be posting and update regarding my stuff publicly.
I am Kival Evan, I am currently an undergraduate computer science student. I develop and create plenty of stuff in my free time, and this is one of them.
When I first developed this website, it was made from pure HTML, CSS, and JS. It was barebone and difficult to manage, I knew from the start I needed a way to automate the process of development that is both maintainable and scalable. As this is a website, I am very much in favour of performance and SEO.
Finding a fitting technology to my need wasn’t an easy task. I had a thought of using server-side like PHP but I find them to be costly, difficult to maintain, and maybe a bit overkill to my need. Not to mention the learning curve is considerably difficult and I’m not willing to commit onto something that I have no confidence in or things that I cannot handle as of yet.
So, I went to look for static site generator, which is also difficult to pick from as there are many of them such as Jekyll, quite intimidating and would require me to learn a plenty. That is until I find…
Thanks to Fireship’s Video, I had come across exactly what I was looking for. A highly-customisable static site generator that supports plenty of technologies/frameworks out of the box. No, I’m not being sponsored, it’s what I found across this being rather intuitive.
It feels similar as to writing regular HTML, but you have the layouts and components to play around with, each of them are scoped making it easier to toy around within context. I was not familiar with the styling convention recommended on Astro but I was able to pick up quickly.
At the time I was writing this, it is currently on v0.19.3, website rewrite starts on v0.18.9. I’ve went through and seen plenty of quirk with Astro but that is to be expected as the technology is very early in development, yet I could see so much potential and I am looking forward to this in the future.
I am by no mean an experienced web developer, at least that’s what I think of myself right now. In fact, this is my first time using a modern technology to build a website. I am relatively new to web development and I find it enjoyable to say the least.