Hello, World!

It had been quite a while since I wanted to havea space on the internet that I could call my own, where I could share my thoughts, projects, and anything else that inspired me. More recently, I realized it was time to stop being just another anonymous entity online and start building a personal brand (because, well, that’s 21st-century networking for you). So, I decided to create this website.

My goal was simple: build something quick, lightweight, and easy to maintain but with room to grow. Aesthetically, I’ve been drawn to brutalism for a while now. When I stumbled upon web brutalism —a design philosophy that prioritizes raw, unpolished content over ornamental form— it immediately clicked. Web brutalism relies on “raw materials”, like <hr/>, <a>, or <div> elements with little to none CSS styling, so they are more “close” to their intended functionality. This approach aligns perfectly with my desire for simplicity and authenticity.

Why I Chose Astro

Although a true brutalist (and minimalist) might have stuck with pure CSS and HTML, I wanted a set of tools to balance simplicity with efficiency. Enter Astro, an all-in-one web framework for building content-driven websites. Astro ticket all the boxes for me:

• It renders to pure HTML and CSS on the server, with zero Javascript by default.
• It allows developers to build reusable, HTML-based components.
• It includes a set of built-in tools to handle content-rich assets, like markdown files. In fact, this entry exists as a markdown file in my project —simple, readable, and easy to edit.

Astro’s features gave me the flexibility I needed to create a site that stayed true to my need of a simple and lightweight website, while still being practical and future-proof.

Key Features of my First Release

Now, allow me to highlight some of the features of my website.

• It’s super lightweight: the average file size of the rendered website (i.e., the contents of the ./dist directory generated by Astro after running astro build) is just 5.39933 kB (uncompressed).
• Minimal CSS and no custom fonts: There are only 190 lines of CSS code in the project, mainly for adjusting the page layout, text size and spacing on headers and lists. Even the <hr/> and <a> elements have been styled minimally. As for fonts, there are no embedded custom fonts—meaning the site relies on system fonts, which vary from device to device. Fun fact: the average Google Font file is 19.75 kB, more than 3 times the average size of my website’s assets.¹

A Roadmap for the Future

This website is not finished (and probably, it will never be). I want this project to be a small playground where I can experiment with new design ideas, programming languages, or even infrastructure. Here are some key features that I will plan to implement in 2025:

• A carbon free website: I’m fascinated by the idea of a low-tech, solar-powered website proposed by LOW←TECH MAGAZINE.² In the future, I want to serve this website from a solar-powered computer at home. It would be exciting to know that my digital footprint is at least partially carbon-free.
• Multilingual support: As a native Spanish speaker, I pragmatically chose to release the first version of my website in English to reach a broader audience. However, I’d love to share content, especially coding tutorials and guides, in Spanish. While Astro makes this implementation straightforward, creating bilingual content will be a labor-intensive process.
• Dithered Images: Again drawing inspiration from LOW←TECH MAGAZINE,³ I want to feature images processed with a dithering algorithm to reduce their size while maintaining a unique aesthetic. Although I’d love to integrate this into Astro’s build process eventually, I’ll likely start by manually dithering each image.

Final Thoughts

This website represents my take on combining minimalism with practicality. It’s a space I’ve created to reflect my ideas, free from unnecessary clutter, but equipped with the tools to make maintenance a breeze. I hope you enjoy exploring it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Footnotes

1. Stoyan Stefanov. “How Many Bytes Is ‘Normal’ for a Web Font: A Study Using Google Fonts.” phpied.com, n.d. https://www.phpied.com/bytes-normal-web-font-study-google-fonts/. ↩

2. Kris De Decker, “About the Solar Powered Website,” LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, n.d., https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website ↩

3. Kris De Decker, Op. cit.. ↩