I built my first developer portfolio back in 2019. It was a static site generated with Jekyll, styled with a custom Sass theme, and hosted on Azure. It served me well for a long time. It had a responsive layout, automated deployments, and a CDN sitting in front.

But as the years went by, the tech stack started to feel increasingly out of step with how I build things today.

The Problem with the Old Stack

| Screenshot of my portfolio project page (Jekyll), 2025

The biggest issue wasn’t that the site was slow or broken. The problem was that it tied me to tools I no longer actively use. Jekyll is a fantastic static site generator, but I rarely touch Ruby anymore.

Hosting the site on Azure also meant managing the underlying infrastructure myself. Even though it only cost pennies a month, I still had to maintain the blob storage, configure the CDN, and deal with manual SSL renewals. Moving to GitHub Pages gave me the exact same result for free, but more importantly, it removed all that friction. GitHub handles the hosting entirely, letting me just push code and forget about it.

Choosing the Right Tools

| Earliest screenshot of my portfolio (HTML + Bootstrap), March 2016

When I first started thinking about a rebuild, I strongly considered Hugo since I frequently use Go in my personal projects. However, I ultimately went with Astro because of its flexibility.

Astro makes it incredibly easy to drop in modern front-end components exactly when I need them, without forcing a heavy framework on me when I don’t. That balance between raw performance and modern developer experience felt like the perfect fit for a content-focused site.

A Living Archive

Once I had settled on Astro and GitHub Pages, I had a choice to make. I could have just ported the old Jekyll site over and called it a day. However, the original code was written back in 2019, and my approach to building software has changed a lot since then.

Instead of carrying over old technical debt, a complete rewrite gave me the chance to start fresh with the tools I actually enjoy using today.

The result is a site that feels faster, cleaner, and significantly easier to maintain. More importantly, it’s no longer just a static portfolio. It has evolved into a living archive—a place to record what I build and a history I can look back on as my work continues to progress.