Building a Portfolio with Astro

Every developer eventually faces the portfolio dilemma: do you spend weeks building the perfect site, or just ship something? I went with the latter.

Why Astro

Astro’s pitch is simple — ship zero JavaScript by default. For a content site like a portfolio, that’s exactly what you want. Pages load instantly because there’s nothing to parse or execute on the client.

The setup

The stack is intentionally boring:

• Astro for the framework
• Tailwind CSS for styling
• Markdown for content

No React, no Vue, no state management. Just HTML that gets served as-is.

Design philosophy

I wanted the site to feel like a well-formatted document. Single column, generous whitespace, monospace headings. The kind of site where the content does the talking.

// Sometimes the simplest code is the best code
const greeting = "Hello, world";
console.log(greeting);

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That quote basically sums up the entire design process.