Barnabas Kendall's Personal Blog
As a little follow-up/reality check to my previous post , I’d like to document my frustration with configuring and launching a new Astro site on Cloudflare, which feels ironic . The specific combo I’ve been wrestling with is pnpm v11 1 and Astro v7 on Cloudflare Workers. Try this: in an empty directory, run pnpm init to get a basic package.json file, then follow the manual setup in the Astro docs…
I’ve recommended Cloudflare Pages in my Budget Website guide for years as the free, git-connected way to host a static site. Lately I’ve been wondering if that’s still the right call, so I went digging through the docs. Pages launched in December 2020 as “the best way to build JAMstack websites,” pitched squarely at Netlify and Vercel, not really at GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages. But it landed in…
There’s a lot of hand-wringing on the Internet about engineers using LLMs to code: whether we’re doing ourselves a disservice, letting our skills atrophy, getting dumber, shooting ourselves in the foot, digging our own graves, etc. My own experience working alongside AI tools like Claude Code has reignited my imposter syndrome to a degree. I’ve felt this way before. Years ago I was asked to…
import Alert from “@components/Alert.astro”; A short parable about trust, taste, and the difference between a job and a craft. There was once a small ship that sailed a steady, well-known coast. Aboard her were a captain, a first mate, and a cook. The captain was a careful man. Each evening he sent for his plate and studied it like a chart: not enough salt here, too much butter there, cut the…
import { Image } from “astro:assets”; import cheaty_flashcards_play from “~/assets/blog/cheaty-flashcards-play.png”; My niece just finished the fourth grade and we were commiserating about learning multiplication tables. We thought, what if there was a game for learning math that let you cheat just a little bit so you don’t get too discouraged? Soon after, Cheaty Flashcards was born. Some of the…
This month I had the opportunity to take Starlight for test drive as a demo for my team’s internal documentation. Although Starlight currently comes with a warning that it’s in early development , we were impressed by its polish and features. I think it has real potential to challenge established documentation SSGs like VitePress or Docusaurus . If you already have Markdown files, it is absurdly…
I have enjoyed using Astro to run both this site and DBaaS Review . I’ve written before about Astro now and again . Recently I decided to migrate DBaaS Review from Astro on Render to Nuxt on Cloudflare. My original motivation was receiving a bill from Render for DBaaS Review’s API. Now $7/month is pretty reasonable, but it got me to thinking. If I could switch from Render to Cloudflare Pages, I…
This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and so I have some visibility to the traffic. Still, it’s useful to have more details than the Cloudflare analytics provide. Years ago the default option would have been Google Analytics, but there are more privacy-friendly alternatives available now. Until today I was using Plausible Analytics on this site and my side project . It costs $9.75/month which…
I just started working for a consulting firm called Fidelity Solutions . In the past I’ve worked with some folks who are there now, so that made it easy to join. I’m really looking forward to working with them again on projects larger than what I could take on solo. I’m grateful that the new job allows me a schedule to continue doing volunteer work. Time is a more precious commodity than we often…
I have developed and written about my own static site search library for Astro. It was fun and instructive. I learned more about search, Astro’s inner workings, and practiced publishing an NPM package. I wanted to provide something as easy to configure and use as the original VuePress static search. It should be possible to whip up a markdown-driven static site with a decent search without begging…