// blog
Hello, World: Why I Built This Site
July 14, 2026 ·metaawsastro
Welcome! This is my corner of the internet where I’ll publish blog posts, project write-ups, proof-of-concepts, and small “today I learned” notes.
Why a personal site?
Three reasons:
- Writing sharpens thinking. Explaining something forces you to actually understand it.
- A public portfolio compounds. Every post and project adds to a body of work I own — not locked in some platform.
- It’s a playground. The site itself is a project: static site generation, CDN, CI/CD, infra-as-code.
The stack
The site is built with Astro — every page is pre-rendered to static HTML at build time, so it loads instantly and there’s no server to maintain.
Hosting is an S3 bucket behind CloudFront:
GitHub → GitHub Actions → astro build → S3 → CloudFront → youTotal monthly cost: roughly the price of a coffee refill. S3 storage for a site this size is pennies, and CloudFront’s free tier covers 1 TB of transfer per month.
What’s next
Expect posts about cloud architecture, POCs I’m hacking on, and lessons learned the hard way. Subscribe to the RSS feed or just check back.