I had been wanting to set up a personal blog for a long time, but never seemed to find the time to do it. I guess I was overthinking it.
As a professional web engineer, I wanted the blog to be completely DIY to reflect my skill set in frontend development (well, I would've permitted myself to use off-the-shelf libraries/modules/packages, so not completely DIY). I insisted on using only the coolest tech and implementing the most stunning and creative UI.
However, achieving all that takes time, and when you do professional web development full-time, finding the energy to work on yet another codebase of similar nature doesn't sound too appealing; I have a life, you know! (Or, at least I like to think I have one outside of work — anyway, I digress.) The point is that building a personal blog from the ground up didn't seem like a project I wanted to dive into right now, and since right now had all of a sudden turned into 5+ years, I decided it was time for action.
So, I did the unthinkable and turned to a starter template. It was actually quite simple: the savvy tech whizz I am, I googled "how to start personal blog engineer" and landed on Vercel's blog template catalogue. I was already planning to host my blog on Vercel anyway — I'm a sucker for its ease of use — so this seemed perfect! There were templates using a headless CMS, and templates using Markdown-based posts you'd store within the file system, so I needed to make a decision on which one to choose. I contemplated going with one using Sanity CMS, but ultimately chose an MDX-based template due to its flexibility and the straightforwardness of not having to deal with another service to host my posts.
When it comes to the stunning visual look I was looking for, right now I actually prefer keeping it pared down. I decided to noodle with the colors a bit, add a theme toggler, and tinker with a few other details, but I'm not going for anything grandiose or flashy today. As the saying goes, 'Perfect is the enemy of good (enough)'.
The tech stack of my chosen template is the following:
TypeScript
Look, I know JS/TS is not what the cool kids like, but I'm a web developer so, for better or worse, these languages are my bread and butter. TypeScript is my go to over JavaScript, and it was already set up with the template, so I'll happily take it.
React
I just wanted to get started with whatever the template had; luckily, I'm very experienced with React. This is a static site with limited interactivity though, so I think React is a bit of an overkill, but it works for now.
Next.js
Since we're using React, Next.js is not a bad choice for Static Site Generation in 2025, and since I'm already familiar with it, let's just roll with it. Astro would be an intriguing alternative here, but I'll explore it another time.
TailwindCSS
I'm actually not a huge fan of Tailwind, at least not for more complex work — though, to be fair, complexity probably won't be an issue here. Maybe I'll write a blog post about my irks with Tailwind in the future.
And that's more or less it! Even though these are not the most exotic/interesting tech choices, they're mature and fast to set up, so they'll do for now. I can always change the stack in the future if I want to and maybe write a blog post about it too.