Why I Had to Rewrite my Personal Website to Stay Sane

I recently rewrote my personal website, moving away from a Gatsby + Strapi stack to a simpler Astro + Svelte setup. Here’s why I made the switch and what I learned along the way.

The Old Stack’s Challenges

My previous website was built with Gatsby and used Strapi as a headless CMS. While this stack worked well initially, several issues made it increasingly difficult to maintain:

1. GraphQL Complexity: I found GraphQL quite complicated and unintuitive, making it difficult to maintain the codebase. While GraphQL is powerful, the overhead wasn’t justified for my relatively simple personal website.

2. Architecture Limitations: The old project’s dependencies no longer compiled on my newer ARM laptop, effectively preventing me from making changes to the core layout. Running an x86 VM just to compile the project seemed like overkill, and upgrading dependencies (especially Strapi) presented significant migration challenges due to DB schema changes.

3. Painful Content Management Workflow: My Strapi server was hosted on a very low-end machine. Making content changes required:

   • Turning on the server
   • Waiting ~10 minutes for it to start up
   • Making changes through the UI which would write to the DB. Then this would trigger a Gatsby rebuild in GitHub which would trigger a Netlify deploy.

This workflow was unnecessarily time-consuming for simple content updates.

4. Deployment Issues: The Gatsby rebuilds of the static website started failing due to outdated dependencies.

5. Infrastructure Complexity: The database was locked in a private VPC on Azure, making schema migrations particularly challenging:

   • Azure doesn’t provide an easy path to migrate from private to public IP
   • Their transfer tool requires a higher-tier node type
   • Upgrading to the minimum allowed node type quickly consumed my $50 monthly credits
   • Node upgrades took 2-3 hours to complete

The Breaking Point

After spending hours trying to fix these issues, I realized I was fighting against unnecessary complexity. The emergence of modern AI-powered development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code opened up a different possibility: rewriting the entire website from scratch.

The New Approach

Why Astro + Svelte?

I have a personal tradition: whenever I update my website, I use it as an opportunity to learn the latest web technologies. My day job primarily involves writing design documents, analyzing ML model performance, and implementing backend business logic in Python. I rarely get the chance to do any frontend development, so my personal website serves as my playground for staying current with modern web development practices.

This time around, I chose Astro and Svelte. Astro has been gaining significant traction in the static site generation space, while Svelte represents a fresh take on frontend frameworks with its compile-time approach to reactivity.

Most of all, I find it fun to tinker even if I waste time understanding the new tech stack.

Replacing the CMS

With modern AI coding assistants, a traditional CMS isn’t strictly necessary for my use case. I can:

• Write content in Markdown/MDX files
• Use AI tools to help implement design changes
• Express what I want to add to the website in plain English
• Have the AI tools help generate and modify the code

This workflow is actually more efficient than using a CMS for my needs, since I’m the only one managing the website.

Looking Forward

This migration has significantly simplified my website’s architecture while maintaining all the functionality I need. The new stack is:

• Easier to maintain
• Faster to deploy
• More straightforward to develop
• Less dependent on external services
• Doesn’t require 2 repos (one for the frontend and one for the CMS)

Sometimes, the best solution is to step back and realize when you’re over-engineering for your use case. For a personal website, simpler is often better.

Appendix: How I used Agents to do this rewrite

Editor + Model

At work, I use Cursor to run agentic workflows but I decided to try GitHub’s recently announced Agentic workflow instead: link.

I don’t pay for the Copilot Pro subscription ever since they made a free tier so I used Claude 3.5 Sonnet since that’s the best model included. If you do pay for pro, I’d highly recommend using the best model available (at the time of writing, that’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

Prompts