It’s been a while. Almost eight years since the last post here. Life happened, priorities shifted, and this little corner of the internet sat quietly collecting dust. But today, something changed.

The migration

This site was originally built with Create React App, Redux, React Router, and a custom content pipeline that converted markdown files into a big JSON blob at build time. It worked well for 2018. But by 2026 standards, the entire dependency tree was frozen in time — React 16, Redux 3, Storybook 3, and dozens of packages with known security vulnerabilities.

Rather than incrementally upgrading through years of breaking changes, I decided to start fresh. The new stack is Astro, a framework purpose-built for content-driven websites. Here’s what changed:

• 37 dependencies → 4. No more Redux, React Router, react-snap, highlight.js, or any of the glue code that held them together.
• Custom content pipeline → Content Collections. Astro reads the markdown files directly. No build scripts, no generated JSON.
• Client-side rendering → Zero JavaScript. The old site shipped the entire React runtime to the browser just to display static blog posts. Now it ships nothing — pure HTML and CSS.
• Build time: seconds, not minutes. 29 pages build in under 2 seconds.

The visual design, the URL structure, the content — everything the reader sees stayed the same. It’s all under the hood.

The AI factor

Here’s the part that would’ve sounded like science fiction back in 2018: the entire migration was done in a single conversation with an AI coding assistant. Not just the boilerplate — the architecture decisions, the component porting, the content migration, the edge cases with MDX and custom components. All of it.

I’ve been a developer for over two decades. I’ve seen tools come and go. But this is genuinely different. The development experience with AI assistance is not about replacing the developer — it’s about removing the friction that makes you abandon side projects. The boring parts, the config wrangling, the dependency hell — that’s where AI shines. It lets you focus on what you actually want to build.

This blog sat dormant for years partly because the idea of modernizing the stack felt like a weekend project I never had the weekend for. With AI, it took an afternoon.

What’s next

I’m excited to be back. There are things I want to write about — frontend architecture, developer tools, the evolving role of AI in software development, and whatever else crosses my mind.

And yes, the search and archive pages have been placeholders since 2018. Maybe it’s finally their time too.

Let’s see where this goes.