I actually started working on this last year when I wanted to try out Astro (3.0 release brought it to my attention) and also finally make a personal website. Since I’ve been using Notion towards the end of grad school and have been using it to store every note I’ve jotted down since then, I wanted to see if there’s a way for me to write blog posts on Notion and hook it up to this website. Essentially I would be using Notion as the content management system. Yeah I could have just put posts as Markdown files in the repo for this website, but why do something boring when I can over-engineer something for fun(™)?
Disclaimer: no shareholder value was harmed in the making of this website.
Luckily enough, others had the same idea, and an Astro-Notion integration had already existed. At the time, pnpm was weirdly unstable for me and I ran into some issues with the dependencies in the repo as is. After forking it and resolving the dependency issues, I decided to try something even newer and potentially more unstable in Bun since the 1.0 release had just dropped. Fortunately, the package management aspect of Bun did work quite well and is also super fast (Theo does some live benchmarks here).
Another tool that I had wanted to try out was Biome. As with the package manager, I was running into some weird issues and slowness with Prettier. Clearly, it was the perfect opportunity to try out an up and coming tool that may or may not be completely unstable 😊.
I would eventually get burned by this sentiment when trying out the Zen Browser and discovering that none of the keyboard shortcuts worked (I can’t believe the unstable tool I chose to use turned out to be unstable!!). As a result, for my Python projects, I have yet to even try out uv as a replacement for Poetry despite 1) having swapped out the combination of Black, Flake8, and isort with Ruff for daily use and 2) encountering a number of frustrations with Poetry at work.
As is common with side projects, this eventually fell to the wayside. Life and work got busy, I got bored, and this repo sat gathering dust. Fast forward a year, I finally found some time to clean it up a bit and put my thoughts to paper.
Today, this website is hosted on Vercel and still has one of their autogenerated domains. One update I do plan on making is to register a domain name that fits well with my own name, given that I’m able to find one that I like. Until then, this website will remain me-chilir the Vercel app 😂.
Update [Feb6/25]: I bought a domain name! This website is now under www.chilir.com. I want to revamp the theming a bit too, stay tuned!