16 August 2026

Just Use Astro

Or “how to stop procrastinating and start writing.”

Don’t get me wrong

I like writing a static site generator as much as the next person. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve written over the years.

But I also know that part of the reason I keep writing them is to avoid writing their content. Took me some time to accept this, but it is true.

As I set out to rebuild my personal website for the umpteenth time, I had to make a decision on how to start. I’m happy with where I landed.

Simple doesn’t mean boring

On my day job, I get to design high performance, mission critical, highly available systems. The stakes are high, and each technical decision matters. It is awesome, but it also not the reality of the majority of software projects – specially personal websites.

Sure, Next.js’s multiple caching layers and edge rendering are great, but I don’t need them here. I feel like I used to be able to start from the basics and build up from there, but many modern frameworks now make me do the opposite – start with complexity and work my way down to simplicity.

Then, there’s Astro. I feel like it is one of the few that managed to retain that simplicity by default while still being extremely powerful when you need it.

More importantly, I’ve never felt the urge to jump straight into creating content as fast as I did with Astro. To me, that’s its killer feature.

Stretching my developer muscles

I’m not gonna lie: a few times when working on this website, I felt the urge to throw in some React state management.

The beautiful thing about Astro is that this fine too. But the fact I had to enable it gave me a second to reflect on whether I really needed it – or actually, wether the convenience of having it was worth the complexity it would add to the project.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. And it felt great to come to that conclusion.

Go create, whatever that means to you

Be it writing, building, drawing, or whatever else you do, know how to set yourself up for creating.

Have fun with the tools, by all means! Tweak your process, your environment, your workflow. But don’t let that be an excuse to not create.

And if you’re looking to create a website (i.e. not an application), just use Astro.