My new website with blog and portfolio. Welcome!

Hello everyone 👋! For those who don’t know me, my name is Daniel Cueto, a software developer passionate about technology and programming.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to develop a website with a portfolio and a blog where I could share my experiences and knowledge.

Years ago, when I was more active in the industry, I had a blog where I shared experiences from events and happenings that helped me grow both personally and professionally. I’ve always had that desire to share everything I’ve been learning. Over the years, I let go of that part of myself that made me feel fulfilled and committed to the community, and I felt the need to come back here, where I am now.

The reasons for my inactivity during this time are something I’d like to keep recorded and reflect on in a series of posts where I’ll talk about it. I believe these could be very constructive for anyone going through similar experiences and processes.

Website developed with Astro, MDX, and React

After spending some time thinking about how I wanted to develop it and how I wanted to use it, I finally opted for what you’re seeing right now.

I ended up choosing Astro as the framework because I felt it met all the needs I wanted to cover, without having to maintain a running service that would result in costs or a higher level of complexity for its maintenance.

I wanted something simple, fast, multilingual, and that I could update regularly. The fact that Astro provides so many tools to develop such a complete static website fascinated me.

In my previous blog, I used to write posts in Markdown, and Astro works very well with Markdown files for rendering. But, in addition, it also has MDX integration, which I found very interesting. Being able to integrate components from any UI library into my Markdown posts gave me absolute freedom.

Why multilingual?

Well, over time, I’ve gradually integrated English as a language I use daily. This year, I set myself the goal of improving my English, and I found within my blog project a place and a justification where I could put the language to use.

Basically, the main reason for this decision is personal learning and integrating the language into as many aspects of my life as possible.

Another reason was to have two versions of the site depending on the language in which the content is consumed, as there are posts that, I know, will be more interesting to a specific target audience, and that the reading might not make much sense to an English speaker.

Conclusion

I’m really, really happy to finally launch the website 😊. There are a bunch of things I still need to integrate, others I need to change because I don’t like them 🥶, and I’ll start cleaning and testing all my code, because after all, this is the first project I’ve worked on with Astro, so as with everything in this field, it’s been a lot of trial and error 🫠.
This is a first beta version of the site, so keep that in mind, as there are some bugs I’ve already identified and things that don’t work the way I’d like them to.

Anyway, I’m super happy to reconnect with the community and talk in depth about the new projects I have in mind for the future.

Sending lots of love, and see you around ❤️

PS: By the way, I’ll be posting a series of articles over the next few weeks about how I developed my website. I’ll soon integrate a newsletter for those who find it more convenient to receive notifications of my new content via email.