This Site: sabado.dev

Problem

I wanted a personal site that practiced what I preach: static-first, fast under load, pleasant to read, and genuinely bilingual. Too many blogs ship megabytes of JavaScript for a handful of pages, and most personal sites treat i18n as an afterthought with awkward URL schemes.

Solution

• Built everything with Astro in static output mode — every page is pre-rendered HTML, so there’s no runtime framework on the client. The only client-side JavaScript is small, targeted islands for search, theming, code copy, and lightbox galleries.
• Implemented i18n as first-class: English and Spanish share a single content schema, are paired by date/order for the language switcher, and keep translated slugs so URLs read naturally in both languages (/blog/rest-to-grpc ↔ /es/blog/rest-a-grpc).
• Added the features a good blog needs: reading time, a tags system with per-locale tag pages, an RSS feed per language, full-text search via Pagefind, and smooth view transitions between pages and posts.
• Only use small inline-SVG icon instead of pulling in an icon dependency, keeping the bundle lean.

Result

• Overwheelming Lighthouse scores with no client framework and no tracking scripts.
• Content is authored once per language in Markdown and wired through a typed content collection, so adding a post or project is a single file.
• Deployed straight to the VPS: a GitHub Actions workflow builds with Bun and rsyncs the static output behind the web server.