The old version of this site was a Next.js app running in my home lab on a small Kubernetes cluster. That was a fun project, but it was more machinery than a personal site needs — a container, a Node server, an ingress, the works.
So I started over with two goals: keep it simple, and use it as an excuse to learn some Azure.
The new setup
- Astro for the site itself. It builds to plain HTML and CSS, ships almost no JavaScript, and has a tidy way to write posts like this one in Markdown.
- Azure Static Web Apps for hosting. Free tier, HTTPS included, and there is no server to babysit.
- Terraform for everything in Azure, so the whole thing is described in code rather than clicked together in a portal.
Why bother
Most of my day is spent on other people’s infrastructure. Rebuilding my own corner of the internet from scratch is a low-stakes way to try tools properly — the kind of tinkering that used to live in my home lab.
More posts to come as I build things out. If you want to follow along, the code lives on GitHub.