sneppard.dev

The site you’re reading. Built with Astro, deployed as static assets on Cloudflare Pages, and rebuilt on every push to main.

Why rebuild it

The first version ran on a hosted site builder. It worked, but it was a closed platform — no repository, no build step, no way to version the thing or deploy it from a commit. For a portfolio whose entire point is demonstrating how I build software, that was the wrong artifact. The site itself should be inspectable.

Astro fit because it ships zero JavaScript by default. A portfolio is almost entirely static content, and shipping a framework runtime to render text is cost without benefit. Interactivity is opt-in per component, which here amounts to a theme toggle.

Notes from the migration

Two things cost real time and are worth recording.

DNS and TLS aren’t the same problem. Getting records to resolve, getting a certificate issued, and getting the origin to serve the right content are three separate failure modes that present almost identically in a browser. Isolating them — checking the platform-provided subdomain before touching the custom domain — turns an opaque failure into an obvious one.

Adapters aren’t free. Cloudflare’s auto-configuration installed an SSR adapter that relocated the build output into a nested directory, so the deploy succeeded while the site returned 404. For a fully static build, no adapter was needed at all. Removing it fixed the problem and shortened the dependency tree.

Stack

Astro with content collections and a typed schema for these project entries, plain CSS with custom properties for theming, @astrojs/sitemap for generation, and Cloudflare Pages for git-driven builds and preview deployments.