Site History

Complete redesign with a terminal/code-editor aesthetic. Dark/light theme support, monospace typography throughout, panel-based layouts mimicking IDE windows. Static site generation with zero JavaScript frameworks. Content collections for blog posts with MDX support.

Dropped Gatsby and its GraphQL data layer in favor of Astro's simpler file-based routing and content collections. Eliminated React dependency entirely. Massive reduction in build complexity and bundle size. No more dependency hell.

Converged the Gatsby rewrite with the main branch. The site was now fully running on Gatsby with a custom theme, markdown-based blog posts, and dynamic page generation via GraphQL.

Found a Gatsby blog starter and rebuilt from there. Dynamic blog list pagination, markdown-based posts with frontmatter, gatsby-transformer-remark for content. Still battling dependency hell between major package versions. Lighthouse performance: 77, accessibility: 90.

Designed layout in Webflow's free tier, then exported HTML/CSS/JS. Used the webflow-to-gatsby npm package (and a custom fork) to convert the export into a Gatsby-compatible project. First step into Jamstack and React-based static sites.

Frustrated with WordPress limitations, started exploring modern front-end. Discovered Jamstack, evaluated Next.js and Gatsby. Chose Gatsby for its static-first approach and rich plugin ecosystem. Branched off to begin the rewrite.

First version of eloibarti.com. Droplet with 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD. WordPress CMS with Elementor for visual editing. No frontend skills required, but expensive plugins, manual update management, and mediocre output quality. The classic "backend engineer does frontend" story.

A backend engineer with zero frontend experience decides he needs a personal website. What could go wrong? Registered eloibarti.com on GoDaddy and began the journey.