I know for a fact that I’m not alone in never getting ideas into fruition, especially hobby projects. I have a good track record of getting an idea, jumping straight into the code and then the interest quickly diminishes. If I hadn’t cleaned up my GitHub repositories every once in a while there would have been a heap of initial commits and nothing else. When you come home from a long day after work you would rather just do something else that doesn’t remind you of work, if you know what I mean?

So why do this anyway?

The blog

In recent years I’ve admired the people that inspire others through blogs, vlogs, presentations, talks, etc. The goal for me was that if I could create some sort of outlet for the things I learn at work and in my hobby projects I would find doing them a lot more interesting as well. Hobby projects for me is something you should do for fun and should not feel like a chore. It’s nice to know that the poorly coded implementations in the project, is in fact your own doing 🙃. Git blame yourself.

Astro 🧑‍🚀 + Tina 🦙 + Sanity 🧿

Having worked with React for many years now I wanted to try something different to challenge myself and learn something new.

Astro is a delightfully simple and performant web framework that is content-driven and leverages server-first rendering to boost performance with minimal overhead.

I juggled the ideas of keeping this very simple with just plain MDX files or to go with a CMS of some kind. To challenge myself I wanted to see how I could actually incorporate a CMS with my Astro blog, which made me try out Tina CMS to generate MDX files automatically based on Tina's content schema. One criteria I had was that it had the ability to run it locally as a standalone solution not needing an account in some cloud service. I got it up and running but had some trouble understanding the schema and their documentation I found lacking and often not up to date. I had to resolve issues based on GitHub issues and other resources than the actual documentation. The final nail in the coffin was upgrading Astro to 5.0 which broke the entire setup for some reason. Personally devastated (not really), I pivoted to the safer option of using Sanity.

I've worked with Sanity at two occasions before and I enjoyed it. They offer a generous free tier for hobbyists which fits this kind of project really well. Also, their support and documentation is really good and always up to date. I didn't really want to use the most popular choice but I also don't want to spend too much time getting this up and running and on top of that struggling to keep it maintained down the line.

Still things to be done

There is still things to be done on this page and things I want to enhance. I had to make a cut off point if I didn't want this project to go the down the same castle in the sky route as bunch of my other hobby projects. Down below is a simple overview of things I want to achieve, minus bug fixes and minor improvements.

• Commenting - Would be useful to have people pointing out all the rights and wrongs about what I write. Let's face it, it's the internet, it will mostly be poinint out wrongs.
• Search and filtering - Let users be a ble to search and filter out what they want to find or read about.
• Day/Night theme - If you're a night owl it would be great to not burn your eye sockets out with my current very light theme.
• Project details - Add a details page about my current projects.

Probably more to do of course. This was just at the top of my head.