Designing My 2025 Personal Site with Astro Islands

I wanted this rebuild to feel more like a personal studio than a static resume. Astro gives me the right balance:

• Authoring stays Markdown-first. I can rough out a post or a project write-up without leaving my editor.
• Client JavaScript is opt-in. Most sections render to static HTML, but I can hydrate a React island for more playful interactions.
• Performance is easy to protect. Tailwind keeps the styling consistent while Astro handles asset bundling and image optimization.

Making the hero feel alive

For the landing section I’m sketching out a layered scene:

1. A glassmorphic card that introduces me and links to the essentials (resume, GitHub, writing).
2. A small React island powered by framer-motion to animate badges drifting in and a parallax glow.
3. Subtle scroll-triggered reveals using the lightweight motion utilities so that the hero text and CTA slide into view.

It’s a lot of polish in a small surface area, which is exactly where I want to spend motion budget.

Structuring content for growth

The new /src/content directory handles everything:

• blog/ for long-form updates like this.
• projects/ for portfolio entries with metadata, tags, and launch dates.
• resume/ for timeline data that feeds the experience and education sections.

Collections give me type safety in frontmatter, so a missing field or invalid link shows up instantly during development.

Next iteration goals

• Compose a project gallery that highlights three flagship builds with animated hover cards.
• Ship the first writing pieces using MDX so I can embed live demos when needed.
• Wire up MiniSearch for client-side search across posts and projects.

Each commit pushes straight to GitHub Pages, so once the hero and lists feel right I can iterate publicly. Astro makes shipping the new version the easy part—the design taste is the real work.