June 2026 Update
From my first Software Engineer role to moving this site from Hugo to Astro, here’s the past year.
It has been exactly one year since my last post, where I promised I would write again within the month. I clearly did not hold up that end of the bargain.
So here it is, a proper update covering what has changed in my life and on this site since then.
Career
First Job
Last year I landed my first Software Engineer role, starting on a probationary basis. I was grateful that the stack overlapped with what I already knew such as React.js and Firebase, while also introducing technologies close enough to pick up quickly like Next.js.
Self-learning
Having a job did not stop me from wanting to keep learning on my own. Cloud computing piqued my interest recently, and it ended up overlapping naturally with things I was already doing like homelabbing, which made it click faster. That led me to enroll in an AWS Solutions Architect course.
While working through the concepts and services, I started migrating some personal projects to AWS such as EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, all under the free tier. I will do a proper write-up on the whole experience once I have the certificate in hand. Good luck to my future self, I guess.
On the mobile side, my skills had also gone stale. The last app I built was from my university days using Ionic, roughly 2 years ago. I decided to pick up Flutter since job listings in my area favor it over alternatives like React Native or Ionic, though I am keeping React Native as a fallback once I finish a project.
Projects
As I mentioned, I moved some personal projects over to AWS. Going through real deployments while following the course has helped significantly, as it gives me a hands-on sandbox to practice the concepts without going past the free tier.
Site Updates
Now for the actual site changes.
Framework
Around January 2026, I migrated this site from Hugo to Astro. The main motivation was adding status widgets with live API integrations like Steam, Spotify, and GitHub, which Hugo could not support cleanly. Astro’s docs even had a dedicated Hugo migration guide, which made moving existing Markdown posts to MDX relatively painless.1 For hosting, Vercel was a natural fit since I was already familiar with it from Next.js projects.
New Content and Layout
Migrating frameworks is pointless without actually using what the new one is good at. The first additions were the status cards with Steam, GitHub, and Spotify in a single-row layout, which I have since expanded to include WakaTime stats, a featured game server, and an Uptime Kuma status monitor as of writing this.
I also refreshed the overall page layout. The design variables stayed the same as the old iteration, but I reworked the structure after getting inspired by bento-style grids I kept seeing while browsing. The goal was to make it feel more modern without overcomplicating it.
Moving Forward
It has been six months since migrating from Hugo to Astro, and there is still a lot I want to add before I would call this site truly complete. Here is what is on the roadmap:
- RSS feed
- Sitemap
- Robots.txt