Site Updated to Astro

Last year, I wrote a post praising Next.js for being easy to develop with. Despite many online complaints about the framework (dependencies on Vercel, tight frontend/backend coupling, the app router’s terrible DX), I genuinely enjoyed using it for my simple website.

Well, that’s changed somewhat.

I recently came across a tweet from the CEO of Vercel (creators of Next.js) supporting Benjamin Netanyahu. In this political climate, going out of your way to endorse such a polarizing figure seems crazy to me and strikes me as a clear invitation to GTFO of Vercel’s product.

I support things that I believe in, and my beliefs don’t happen to align with supporting a war criminal. So, I shall accept that invitation.

LLMs are quite good at JavaScript these days. With just 2 hours of work, I’ve migrated the entirety of my site from Next.js to Astro and from Vercel to Netlify. I also find Astro’s abstractions even easier to work with and have slimmed down my dependencies by quite a bit. With pure static site generation and Cloudflare CDN, my pages load in <100ms when the cache is warmed up.

That’s all for now. Farewell, Next.js and Vercel—welcome, Astro and Netlify.