In the process of exploring a career outside of academia, I have enjoyed developing and gaining skills beyond that which might be required had I wanted to stay. Looking towards software engineering roles, building a website seemed like a natural step; it offers a landing page for my identity and provides an online portfolio demonstrating my work. Already familiar with the ideas of static sites from conversations with friends who are full-stack web devs, I looked for a flexible web framework that could generate a site based on markdown content, whilst also providing JavaScript components. Astro stood out as a modern, easy to use framework that is flexible and could build a fast site driven by my content. Its mantra of “Zero unnecessary JavaScript overhead, sending lightweight HTML to the browser”, particularly appealed, as did its community and documentation.
It has delivered abundantly, allowing me to go from essentially no experience with web development to a published site in just over a week of work here and there in the evenings/weekend. The beautiful set of templates they have available was a key benefit, with thanks here going to Mark Horn’s Astro Sphere.
I’ve now got the bug and expect to continue tweaking and developing more of the code as I get a feel for web dev and design.