MJ Codes Presents:

Programmer's Starter Blog

Tech Stack 🛠️

Outline

• Astro for static site generation (SSG)
• Tailwind CSS for styling
• Sanity for the content management system (CMS)

This website was built with Astro, a static site generator (framework) for content-driven websites.

Why Astro?

Well, the previous iterations of this website were built using GatsbyJS, which was a SSG first framework and I loved how fast my website was. When I looked at Astro, I saw that it had SSG-first approach as well which is what I wanted.

Not only was it fast, Gatsby had one of the best plugin ecosystem for a JavaScript I have seen. Even Next.js doesn't come close. Astro has its own "plugin" system, which allows integrations from different frameworks such as React, Vue, Svelte, Solid in my case, I used React components to handle state changes in some parts of this site, such as Services toggler system.

When I first started off as a programmer, I didn't know that I would one day need to have a portfolio to showcase my work. I have made four iterations of the same website (this being the forth) and last two were built with GatsbyJS, a React based framework.

Astro Starter Kit: Basics

npm create astro@latest -- --template basics

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.svg
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   │   └── Card.astro
│   ├── layouts/
│   │   └── Layout.astro
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.astro
└── package.json

Astro looks for .astro or .md files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

There's nothing special about src/components/, but that's where we like to put any Astro/React/Vue/Svelte/Preact components.

Any static assets, like images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

👀 Want to learn more?

Feel free to check our documentation or jump into our Discord server.