Hello World

This is my first blog on this new website that I rewrote from Next.js to Astro.

At some point, I started feeling like using Next.js or React in general was unnecessary for my personal website. I added components, animations, transitions, and all those fancy things because they looked cool, but eventually it just started feeling like bloat.

For a personal site, I think the most important things are functionality, readability, and delivering what the user actually came for. I was also watching a video by Theo about using plain HTML in the modern web. That video reminded me of evenbettermotherfucking.website.

I was honestly surprised by how simple it was. Just a tiny CSS file with barely any decoration, yet it still works perfectly and delivers exactly what it needs to.

That got me thinking about what framework I should actually use. I didn’t really want to go fully back to writing raw HTML for everything, so after looking at my use cases, Astro felt like the perfect middle ground.

And honestly, I really like it so far.

It feels simple in the same way HTML, Vanilla Javascript, Python, C, or Arch Linux feel simple. Lightweight, straightforward, and easy to understand once you get into it. Since I already had experience with that kind of tooling, Astro felt very natural to work with.

This is also the first website I’ve built in Astro with AI as my assistant, of course.

So yeah, thanks for stopping by and reading.

You can follow me on Twitter if you want to see more random stuff I build or write about.

— Gaurav Ghosh