# How I Built My Developer Blog: Tools, Trade-offs, and Lessons Learned

## Why I Wanted a Developer Blog

As my career in software engineering evolves, I wanted a space to:

- Share learnings.
- Reflect on my side projects.
- Share my industry thoughts and views.
- Build out my profile.
- Low cost / free.

I already had a [Substack](https://substack.dileeparanawake.com/), but hadn’t used it much and it was a bit unfocused (I started my substack a year ish ago as a kind of catch all blog to share broad thoughts).

It was easy to get started on Substack, but I found its push toward monetisation a bit off-putting (I don’t want to paywall my content). I wanted a clean, developer-focused blog, without aggressive paywalls and email capture and a bit more customisability.

So I started exploring other options...

## Considering Static Sites and GitHub Pages

I wanted to keep it simple, and keep it low cost! A static site hosted via GitHub Pages is free, fast, and version-controlled.

After a bit of searching I found **[Bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com/)** and found a lot of nice, [free templates](https://html5up.net/), and started tinkering...

### What I liked:

- Simple to set up
- Great for a no-frills landing page
- Loads of community templates

### What I didn’t:

- I could see routing and organising posts becoming a pain quickly.
- Didn't want to spend time writing boilerplate or patching together workarounds.
- I could see it as easy to outgrow for more complex content e.g filtering tags, components, routing etc.

This made me stop and ask: what do I really need?

## Step 2: Defining My Requirements

Roughly, I needed:

- A standard blog layout (posts, tags, nav)
- Markdown support
- Easy updates and routing
- Custom domain
- Low or no cost

I didn’t want to spend too much time maintaining infrastructure, but something a bit more powerful and flexible, that could accommodate more complex and dynamic elements

## Step 3: Trying Astro

Astro caught my eye. It’s lightweight, fast, and developer-friendly. I built a minimal Astro blog, deployed it via GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions. Quite fun. Easy. I avoided something like Next.js + Vercel - simply for cost and rendering speed (and maybe I was a little lured by new and shiny)...

I built a little Astro blog (not a looker!) to familiarise myself with the framework, test out GitHub actions and deploy to pages and Astro basics. You can see my GitRepo [here](https://github.com/dileeparanawake/astro-blog) and the live site [here](https://dileeparanawake.github.io/astro-blog). If it was my main production site I'd have started with their [free templates](https://astro.new/latest/), to avoid wasting time on styling etc...

[![my simple astro blog](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dileeparanawake/astro-blog/main/astro_Screenshot.png)](https://github.com/dileeparanawake/astro-blog)

### What I liked:

- Nice [getting started guide](https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/)
- Fast static generation
- Easy GitHub deployment
- Markdown-friendly
- More flexibility than Bootstrap - eg more powerful links, react like components for things like nav bars, markdown support to easily turn a folder of posts into a cms like sortable post structure.
- Lots of [free templates](https://astro.new/latest/)

### What I didn’t:

- No native newsletter or analytics.
- Required a bit more wiring up (e.g., custom routing, metadata)
- Still felt like I’d be spending time tweaking instead of writing, especially when I added up my requirements (analytics - quite easy via Google, newsletters etc).

If I was building a custom blog or had time to spare, Astro would be a great choice - I could see it being fun, powerful and connecting something like PostHog, for more privacy centric analytics.

## Step 4: Substack Again? Almost...

I briefly considered going back to Substack—its built-in email support was tempting—but the paywall-first model, low customisability, broad focus, didn’t feel right for what I wanted.

## Step 5: Finding Hashnode

Eventually, I discovered **Hashnode**. It ticked nearly all my boxes:

- Custom domain support
- Free to use
- Newsletter integration
- Built-in analytics
- Developer-focused (Markdown, GitHub embeds, etc.)
- No hard sell on monetisation
- Customisable for the future, but easy to set up.
- Developer focused community
- Good for SEO

It felt like the right middle ground: more power and polish than Substack, less setup than Astro or Bootstrap... and importantly I wanted to allocate more time to building cool things... so I took the leap, got on Hashnode and published my first post (this one!).

Ultimately, I learned that clear requirements—even for personal projects—can save a lot of time building, researching, and second-guessing.

## Lessons Learned

I approached this like a real project: defining requirements, prototyping, testing tools, iterating, refining my requirements and deciding what to use based on value vs. effort.

**Here's my learning summary:**

- **Specs matter**: even for personal projects, define your requirements early. It’ll save you time and indecision later. Specs are always a little emergent in that discovery phase, but it pays to define the key outcomes, upfront (as well as you can).
- **Bootstrap is solid** for simple landing pages, but not ideal for content-heavy blogs.
- **Astro is brilliant**, especially if you want to build something fully custom and fast.
- **Substack is great if you're newsletter/ paywall first**, want a broader audience \*\*but not if you want control.
- **Hashnode hits the sweet spot** for developer blogs with minimal setup and good features.

## What’s Next

I’ll be using this blog to share what I’m learning, document side projects, and reflect on my journey into software engineering, sharing my thoughts on the industry.

You can **[sign up for email updates here](https://dileeparanawake.com/newsletter)** or [follow my GitHub](https://github.com/dileeparanawake) as I build stuff 🙂