We are live!

I was not expecting to wait so long to publish this website, but I finally did it. I started working on it back earlier in 2025, but as sometimes happens, everyday life things get in the way, priorities shift, and here we are, months later down the line.

There are few things that I would like to share with you regarding how I made this website. I’m not going to dive deep into the technical details, maybe I’lI do it in the future, I haven’t decided yet. I want this post to be the first of a long series, and a charm of good luck to my future endeavours.

Why am I here? How did I end up writing blog posts? Let’s start from the beginning. It was a day like any other here in Tokyo. I was alone in my apartment and the weekend just started. I had no plans and that means only one thing: plenty of free time to work on a side project. But what though? And then, it came back to my mind. Something that I wanted to do for a very long time but always ended up pushing back. A personal website.

At that moment it felt like a smart idea. Something feasible in a weekend I thought, something that I need and will definitely turn out to be useful in the long run. I can just start designing and developing it, work as much as I feel like, and If I can’t finish it during the weekend I can always complete it later without pressure or deadlines.

After thinking about how to approach the problem, suddenly I realized one thing. It felt more like a chore than an interesting side project. Something that I had to do, because I thought it would be useful for my “long term objectives”, not because I wanted to do it. We all know what that means. I told myself that I needed to give it an interesting spin or this weekend project will be short-lived and doomed to never see the light of day (as what usually happens with most of my side-projects).

I was already well into my initial research, and after the first sense of overwhelm and despair that you feel when you realize how many JS frameworks are out there nowadays, I stumbled upon Astro. It solved everything that I possibly wanted, and more. It looked simple and fast to pick up. All bonus points for a web dev to which back-end has been his bread and butter. It needed to be as simple as possible, fast to iterate on and ship stuff with. Astro checked all these marks, and after going through the documentation and the initial tutorial to get started, I had something working in no time.

I mentioned an interesting spin before, but what was that exactly? What did I end up adding to the original idea I had in mind? The initial scope I envisioned for the project was to have a reference website for contacts, prospect leads and peers. Some sort of CV always online with contacts information along with it. Then I found it, in the very official Astro tutorial that I was fiddling with. This framework makes it almost effortless to create blog style content, just by using markdown files. So I told myself, why not give it a try?

Everything is static and pre-built by default in Astro, and it gives you the possibility to build more complex and interactive solutions only when (and if) you need them. This is what I like the most about it. Keep it simple as long as you can, until your requirements change and you’re forced to rethink your approach.

At this point I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t have an idea on how to present it, what design it should have. Then casually, while scrolling through the Astro official website, I found this amazing section where devs were sharing resources, themes, and websites fully built with the framework. I stumbled on Timothy Eaton’s theme (check him out if you can, credit in the footer) and the rest is history.

I am very happy with the result. The implementation was simple and fast, I saw a new fresh perspective on how to build web apps. Astro is amazing. I got myself some help for the design. We are online. Life is beautiful.

Honestly, if you are even remotely thinking of making a static website (but not only), try giving Astro a shot. You might get surprised, as I did.

My dear reader, thank you for passing by. I hope you found this post somewhat useful and/or entertaining.

Thank you.