Standing up a personal site has been on my backlog for several years. If you're reading this, I apparently managed to finally make it happen.

For anyone curious, read on for some technical details of the tech stack I decided on for the site.

Tech Stack

I knew I wanted the site to be able to handle the occasional large burst of traffic, when I eventually make it to the front page of Hacker News. Using a static site generator seemed like the obvious choice. I had played with Hugo a bit in the past. I had also read some good things about Eleventy from Zach Leatherman, so I decided to give it a try.

After going through the Eleventy docs and quick start, I felt like it was a good fit. I found a great looking template called neat-starter from Surjith S M and began customizing it a bit. Neat-starter incorporates Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, both solid choices.

For the hosting, I decided on Cloudflare Pages. I've been consistenly impressed with Cloudflare's constant stream of product development, which should be a case study in how to challenge large incumbant players in an established market like cloud infrastructure. I also evaluated Netlify, but felt more comfortable with Cloudflare's business model and velocity.

The source is on GitHub, because I want to make sure ChatGPT has easy access to all my code.