Notes / 2026-10-20
Why This Site Uses Astro 7
Content model, default performance and long-term maintenance: why this personal site chose Astro 7 over Next.js or Nuxt.
Requirements
The core of this site is not an “app” but “content”: a personal introduction, 12 project case studies, and a handful of technical notes. The only interactions are filtering, sorting, search, theme and a lightbox — no login, no database, no runtime backend.
The requirements come down to four: content must be constrained by a type system, the first screen must be fast, deployment must require zero ops, and it must still be upgradeable five years from now.
Comparison
Among the candidates, Next.js has the largest ecosystem, but bringing RSC and a caching model to static content adds more conceptual burden and default JS size than needed; Nuxt’s content capabilities are close to Astro’s, at the cost of default hydration; Hugo builds fastest, but its template expressiveness and componentization are insufficient, and a custom design means writing a lot of hand-written JS.
Astro’s fit is direct: zero client JS by default, content collections validated at build time with Zod, and islands to partially activate only where interaction is needed. Its assumption of a “content site plus a little interaction” matches this project exactly.
Trade-offs
Choosing Astro 7 also means accepting its changes: 7.0 replaced the previous remark/rehype pipeline with Vite 8, a Rust compiler and Sätteri. For projects that do not depend on remark plugins this is almost invisible; but when plugins are needed, you have to switch back to unified explicitly.
Another constraint is the toolchain: TypeScript 7 is already npm latest, but the type-checking and lint ecosystem has not caught up, so the project pins TypeScript 6.0.3 and writes the upgrade conditions into an ADR.
Conclusion
Framework choice is not about “who is strongest” but “whose defaults are closest to your problem”. This site’s defaults are static, content-first and low-interaction, and Astro 7 turns exactly those defaults into the product.
The related decisions are recorded in ADR 0001, 0004 and 0011.
Implementation index
astro.config.mjs: static output, site and integration configuration.src/content.config.ts: Content Collections and the Zod schema.src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro: SEO, theme, fonts and route layout.