Phillip Byram
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Hello, World

meta astro web

The site is live.

After running an Angular app deployed to Google Cloud for a while, I wanted something simpler — a place to write, share projects, and own my content without operational overhead.

What I built it with

  • Astro — static site generator with zero JS by default
  • Tailwind CSS — utility-first styling
  • MDX — write posts in Markdown with optional component imports
  • GitHub Pages — free, reliable static hosting

Why Astro

Astro’s islands architecture means the site ships pure HTML by default. Interactive pieces get hydrated individually only where needed — no full React tree, no hydration overhead for a page that’s mostly text.

Content collections give every blog post a type-safe schema validated at build time. If I forget a required frontmatter field, the build fails loudly instead of silently serving broken data.

What’s next

This is v1 — intentionally minimal. The roadmap includes:

  • More posts
  • A proper projects page
  • Site search
  • Dark mode improvements

The source is on GitHub.