Though I am proud of the initial version of my website, and learnt some JavaScript and Ruby along the way, I was never fond of how jenky the final product was nor how difficult it was to customise. Because of this and my assistance in helping port the UQ Mechatronics and Robotics Society’s (UQ MARS) website to Astro, I decided it was time to remake mine utilising this framework. By doing so, I had two similar but different projects to rapidly develop my understanding of the features and tools and better implement a final product for both.

Why Astro?

Initially, I wanted to write my own website in Rust using WASM. I had worked on this for about three months but had a series of issues. The major issue being that automatically deploying blog posts this way was more tedious then the current solution. The next plan was to continue my Rust front-end and utlise Go for the backend. But this would mean I would need to migrate from GitHub pages to another platform. It would also require a lot of initial effort with little reward for what I wanted to do with my website currently. This current solution, as mentioned, came about when assisting UQ MARS in updating their website.

Astro allows for simple integration of various tools with JavaScript or TypeScript. It gives me all the front end features I wanted from Rust. This framework is also easily customisable, and I should be able to make changes that best fit my needs for years to come.

The Future

From now, I can include images, YouTube videos, code snippets, and LaTeX on this site. This will allow me to better communicate my projects and thoughts in the future. I am using Bun as the package manager and runtime for the website as it is much faster that pnpm which I was originally using.

As of writing this, I am working on numerous and varied projects that I am looking forward to show casing.