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feat(software): astro port blog

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Barrett Ruth 2025-05-22 20:51:54 -05:00
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@ -5,7 +5,29 @@ date: "18/06/2024"
## Update: Port to Astro (<span class="date">22/05/2025</span>)
hi
I'm expanding my website to included more detailed algorithms, implementations, write-ups, and low-level optimization case studies.
I thought about writing these posts in the raw HTML as I've been doing and physically cringed.
Then I recalled the below post I made around one year ago and realized the following:
- Sure, you can be efficient with raw HTML/CSS/JS. However, _no matter what you do_ snippets, hotkeys, etc, nothing is fast than writing markdown.
- Overhead (i.e. the massive overhead of copying over content, writing the html) matters
- I'll be needing more advanced features that, while possible to do in vanilla web, would just be painful to maintain.
- Sure, frameworks come with bloat. At this point, I'd added web components and script finagling&mdash;I was on the path to reinventing React myself.
Enter [astro](https://astro.build/).
- Lower overhead
- Small bundle size
- SSR opt in/out
- Minimal boilerplate
Everything is now in MDX. I had to say goodbye to my d3 latex labels (I could only do this with MathJax, which I recently found out was overkill for my needs) and a bit of custom styling.
On the upside, I have around the same LOC, a dead-simple blog post setup ([here](https://github.com/barrett-ruth/barrettruth.com/commit/8666e5a16983b177118f6e8a3246feb0d6907fff) was my biggest commit), and the entire Astro community at my back.
The choice of Astro was of no significance. It did the job and that's all that matters. I'm not quite a fan of the funky `---` syntax to separate HTML and JS, though. I find it counterintuitive to separate the UI and the frontend logic, which ought to be tightly coupled. I don't want to imagine working on larger files in Astro.
## HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
@ -13,10 +35,10 @@ That's all there is to it.
I thought about using the following frameworks:
1. [React.js](https://react.dev/)
2. [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/)
3. [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/)
4. [Astro](https://astro.build/)
1. [React.js](https://react.dev/)
2. [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/)
3. [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/)
4. [Astro](https://astro.build/)
But I did not actually _need_ any of them to make this site look decent.