This is my first post on my website/blog. I am not a huge fan of the word blog, so I might be changing that out for something else.

About the site

I think that virtually every computer science student ends up making a personal website. Most people end up creating a static site, and that is what I was leaning towards at first. However, I end up working on a ton of side projects, and I have always wanted a way to share them. A static site wouldn’t really meet the requirements I had, so I started searching for a relatively simple way to create a personal website. I have experience with using React, Material UI, and AWS through a previous internship, but that seemed like overkill for my needs. In the end, I ended up going with Astro.

Why Astro?

I chose to use Astro because it’s optimized for content heavy sites and it’s relatively simple to work with. I don’t have much web development experience, so I wanted to go with something that was more powerful than a static site, but not too complicated to learn. Astro also has a number of features that were perfect for my use case, some of my favorites include:

My Favorite Astro Features

• Markdown and MDX support
  • Allows me to import components into Markdown text
• Framework agnostic
  • Through integrations, I can use things like React, Vue, etc.
• Optimized for content heavy sites
  • Astro renders pages as static HTML by default, and only “hydrates” interactive components when needed

Overall, I think that using Astro will allow me to showcase what I’m doing in a manner that’s simple to create and beautiful to view. I would highly recommend Astro to anyone who is new to web development, and wants more than a basic site. I’ll be making future posts about how I choose to host the site, any future thoughts on using Astro, and of course any other projects I am working on.