Welcome to the blazing-fast latest version of my website, powered by Astro and Sanity CMS!

I have loved working with Astro—it’s so fast, and I enjoy the Astro interactive islands approach. The syntax for Astro components is easy to learn too. I have a renewed vigor towards this site!

Almost 10 years ago, I launched this site on a WordPress theme that I’d laboriously hacked together with Bootstrap components with little to no PHP knowledge. Back then, I had to manually drag and drop files onto an FTP server just to update the site, which was a painful and error-prone process. Web development sucked back then.

Between 2015–2022, this site was rebuilt four times. I was never happy with the design and liked tweaking it as I became a better designer and developer.

I started with an email signup, but I killed it after a few years because I’d never sent an email.

I’m a performance nerd. I love the process of tuning my site to get all the speed out of it I can. I got my WordPress versions to a well-oiled machine. It was blazing fast, with layers of caching and minification. However, I got tired of WordPress development—it’s pretty old-school. I wanted something new.

In 2022, I ported (rather haphazardly) my WordPress theme into a Next.js and Sanity CMS headless static site stack. It was right when Next.js added the app router, which from my understanding now was a weird time as a Next.js developer.

I wanted to be able to iterate quickly and have a modern development process and not have all the extra junk I didn’t need from WordPress.

My site felt quicker. Weirdly, performance benchmarks were not as great though. I did a few iterations, but it largely was left unchanged.

But I did, however, start publishing more!

My repository for my Next.js project was a mess, and maintaining it became a mission. The way I'd set it up wasn't ideal and I'd have to totally rework the project to fix it. I didn’t love Next.js either. I love working with React.js, but having it used for an entire site felt like overkill for me.

Now it's here: December 2024 and the latest and fastest version of this site, all built with Astro! I’ve come a long way as a developer since V1 of this site.

I’ve tried to make the site more accessible and readable, and I’ve also made my recipes section available—yes, I’ve been secretly publishing recipes. Surprise! My Qabli Pulao recipe is one of my most visited pages.

I intend to write more. I’ve got a lot of content mostly written that I never published. Generative AI has really helped me with my confidence in publishing content—having something to proof my writing and provide feedback has been incredibly reassuring.

Let's see if my output matches my ambition. Bring on 2025.

Josh Wayman
Josh Wayman

I love the interplay between tech and human behaviour! I write about strategy, data, product and tech.