I have this website primarily just for fun—it’s a nice, low-stakes project for me to play with every now and then. It’s been very good practice with CSS (though my skills still aren’t amazing) and was my first project using Next.js and more recently Astro as well, so it’s been a good learning experience for sure.

I’ve written some blog posts that I’m hosting here as well, go check them out if you’re interested!

Stack

• I recently migrated this website from Next.js to Astro. The migration was actually really easy, it took me just a couple of hours to do. I love Astro so far, it feels like exactly what I want out of a front end framework. From my experience thus far, the development experience and capabilities are on par with popular Javascript frameworks like Next.js, yet it doesn’t lock you into the approach of loading a huge bundle of Javascript on the client to generate the entire page. I think React is great, but getting to pick and choose where to use it without making your entire site depend on it is really nice for a simple site like this.

• It’s being deployed on www.camfeenstra.com using AWS cloudfront and ACM for certificate verification.

  • It’s an entirely static site so the hosting cost is basically free, and ACM ensure that there’s no need to worry about certificates either
  • This deployment method is great—there’s nothing for me to worry about, including costs.
  • I’m using Pulumi to do the deployment—you can find the actual config in the infra directory of the repo above. I use pulumi to deploy almost everything these days—it can be slow, but overall the experience is great and uniform across any type of project.

• Airtable for the “Join mailing list” form. Still waiting for someone to actually use that 😂 .

Pretty simple! I love working with infrastructure, but no need to introduce complexity where it isn’t needed.