It’s been a year (and 4 months) since I first brought v0.1.0 of astrid.tech online! Additionally, it’s been just over a year since I published v1.0.0, which I considered the first “complete” version of my site! (spoiler alert: the site is never complete)

astrid.tech has evolved so much since then. You could even make a joke about Theseus’ ship with it, since I’ve changed frontend frameworks and I’m about to rewrite the backend as well.

But in all seriousness, this has been a really amazing several months. Even though this project will probably never be completed, I’ve learned so much while doing it, like:

• Web development, but for reals this time instead of half-assed HTML pages!
• So many different frameworks, including React, Django, Gatsby.js, Next.js, Rocket.rs…
• The Rust Language! First with the link shortener, and then with the webmention receiver. Eventually, with the CMS!
• The Haskell Language! Sorta. I didn’t make anything that works, but I certainly did learn a lot about functional programming. I’ve finally wrapped my head around functors, applicatives, and monads!
• Deploying this project led me down the path of learning DevOps and all the tooling related to that, as well as building my homelab. That eventually led to me getting my internship, which eventually led to my job offer!

Sure, no one reads my blog posts, but even despite that, having and managing a website is fun! Not only does it give hacker cred, it’s honestly just… satisfying. Like, all these pages I’ve designed, all this content that I’ve written, all of this effort and love I’ve poured into these JSX tags… this website really is like a personal home I’ve built on the internet.

Here’s to another year of operation!