Switching to Astro (With Help From AI)

Moving away from GatsbyJS and redeveloping on Astro. And using AI to do it.
Moving away from GatsbyJS and redeveloping on Astro. And using AI to do it.
Image credit: Chris Lawton on Unsplash
About four years ago, I moved this site from an aging Drupal installation to GatsbyJS. I was happy with the performance, but the whole thing did feel overly complex for a simple blog. Finally in 2025, I'm switching again to Astro. And I used the Cursor IDE to build the site.
Which is the better programming practice for JavaScript? Promise chain or async/await?
Image credit: marcos mayer on Unsplash
"When I was your age, we used to do callback functions all the way down and be happy with it!"
-Someone (Possibly me.)
If you've written JavaScript for a while, you've probably seen code that needed several asynchronous steps and used callbacks within callbacks. This often led to the dreaded Pyramid of doom and made the logic very difficult to understand. Things are easier since ES2015 with the introduction of Promises, and then async/await in ES2017. I often wonder though: "Do we really need async/await
?
How to speed up terminal login times with zsh on MacOS.
Image credit: Pascal van de Vendel
I use MacOS for most of my work and one annoying thing slowly creeping up on me is how slow it is to open a new terminal window. Finally, I reached the breaking point when it seemed like every new terminal login was taking several seconds. Small delays like this can really break you out of your flow. I had to take action.
Switching from a CMS to a static site.
Image credit: Giuseppe Milo
You may have thought about switching to a static site, but what do you give up? If you're moving from a fully-featured Content Management System, you lose a lot. Like many choices, it's a tradeoff. A CMS offers many features and capabilities, while a static site excels at speed and simplicity.
There's static, and there's sorta static.
There's static, and there's sorta static.