Hello World: Building This Blog

• 2 min read
astro webdev tailwind

Welcome — really glad you found your way here. Every blog needs a first post, and rather than writing some abstract mission statement, I thought the most honest thing I could do was show you what this place is made of: the tech stack, the decisions behind it, and what I’m hoping to share with you going forward.

The Stack

Here’s what’s running under the hood:

  • Astro 5 for static site generation with islands architecture
  • Tailwind CSS v4 for utility-first styling
  • MDX for rich content authoring
  • Vercel for deployment

Nothing exotic, but every choice was deliberate. I wanted something I’d actually enjoy writing in, and something that would get out of my way when I just needed to publish a post.

Why Astro?

I’d been watching Astro for a while before committing to it. What finally won me over is its content-first philosophy — it ships zero JavaScript by default, which keeps pages fast without any extra effort on my part. When I do need interactivity (like the travel map you’ll find elsewhere on the site), I can drop in a component and tell Astro exactly when to hydrate it. That granular control feels right.

// Example: fetching articles
const articles = await getCollection("articles");
const published = articles.filter((a) => !a.data.draft);

That snippet is essentially how the article listing page works. Dead simple, and it stays fast because there’s no client-side data fetching involved.

Tailwind v4 handles the styling, and MDX means I can write in familiar Markdown while still pulling in components when a post calls for something richer. Vercel wraps it all up with a deployment pipeline that’s been essentially invisible — which is exactly what you want from infrastructure.

What You’ll Find Here

This blog is split across two threads: engineering projects and travel experiences. On the engineering side, I’ll write about things I’m actually building — the tradeoffs I ran into, what worked, what didn’t. On the travel side, I’ll share stories from wherever I happen to end up, with a bit more honesty than the typical travel post.

Both threads matter to me, and I think they’re more connected than they might seem at first. Building things and exploring places share the same underlying impulse — curiosity about how the world fits together.

What’s Next

There’s a lot I’m looking forward to writing. If any of this sounds like something you’d want to read, stick around. I’m glad to have you here.