Hello, world!
Welcome to my blog! This is the story of three websites in six years.
Hey, I’m Dennis! I’m a Platform Engineering Lead, homelab enthusiast, guitarist, and photographer based in Philadelphia. Welcome to my corner of the internet.
This is the third iteration of my personal website, and I figured the occasion deserved a proper first post.
Three websites in six years
Over the past six years, I’ve built three different versions of this very website, each with a different tech stack and design.
The first version of this site was built with Django back in mid 2020. It was one of my first real web projects: a monolithic Python app that served HTML templates with a bit of CSS, plus blog content from a database. It absolutely did the job, but I quickly learned of more exciting frameworks and languages soon after.
Half a year later in late 2020, I completely rewrote the website, splitting things up into a React frontend and a Rust backend powered by Rocket and Diesel. Back then, there was all the hype around Rust (and React too) and I found myself following that train. To this day, Rust is still one of my favorite languages and I hope to get opportunities to use it more! But anyway, over time, maintaining a full backend for what was essentially a static site with a few dynamic features started to feel like overkill. And besides, there was a new exciting framework I wanted to try!
That brings us to the current version, built with Astro! Astro’s novel Islands Architecture and ergonomic developer experience make it a joy to work with. The whole thing is simpler to maintain and faster to iterate on, which is exactly what I wanted.
Each rewrite was a great way to learn new technologies and improve the design and content of my personal website. I’m happy with how it turned out, and I hope you enjoy it too!
What to expect
I plan to write about platform engineering, software development, side projects, and whatever else I find interesting. I’ll also be adding more of my photography and guitar recordings over time, so check out the photos and guitar pages if you’re interested!
Here’s a sample guitar recording.
Now playing
Here’s a sample photo too!
Thanks for stopping by! Read more about me and feel free to connect with me on my socials or subscribe to my RSS feed!