Building my portfolio with Astro
Why I went with Astro for my portfolio and how it all came together.
Decided to finally build a real portfolio site. I wanted something fast, easy to update, and that didn’t require running a server just to serve some HTML. Static made the most sense.
I looked at a few options and landed on Astro. The main selling points for me were that it ships zero JavaScript by default and has really solid built-in support for Markdown, which is exactly what I wanted for a blog. No separate CMS, no database, just files.
The design is deliberately simple. Dark background, neutral grays, nothing that distracts from the content. Spent more time than I expected getting Tailwind v4 configured the way I wanted but it works well now.
Blog posts are Markdown files in src/content/blog/. Frontmatter handles the metadata, Astro handles the rest. Adding a new post is just creating a file, which is the whole point.
Deployed it on Oracle Cloud’s free tier with Nginx. Got HTTPS set up with an SSL cert from Porkbun. Total hosting cost: $0.
It’s not fancy but it does exactly what I need it to do.