How this site is built

Since this is a developer blog, let’s start with a dev log about the site itself.

The idea

I wanted a site that is fast, cheap and easy to maintain. So there is no server and no database. Every page is a plain file that is built once and then served from a CDN.

The ingredients

• Astro turns Markdown files and small components into static pages.
• Plain CSS with a handful of design tokens. Dark mode simply swaps the colours.
• Hand-drawn SVGs for icons and illustrations: tiny, sharp on every screen and themeable.
• Cloudflare hosts the result, so the running costs are basically just the domain name.

Writing a post

A new post is just a Markdown file. Commit, push, done. The site rebuilds itself.