Itās been a year (and 4 months) since I first brought v0.1.0 of astrid.tech online! Additionally, itās been just over a year since I published v1.0.0, which I considered the first ācompleteā 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 Theseusā ship with it, since Iāve changed frontend frameworks and Iām 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, Iāve 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.rsā¦
- The Rust Language! First with the link shortener, and then with the webmention receiver. Eventually, with the CMS!
- The Haskell Language! Sorta. I didnāt make anything that works, but I certainly did learn a lot about functional programming. Iāve 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, itās honestly just⦠satisfying. Like, all these pages Iāve designed, all this content that Iāve written, all of this effort and love Iāve poured into these JSX tags⦠this website really is like a personal home Iāve built on the internet.
Hereās to another year of operation!