Why this site runs on Astro and Cloudflare Workers

This post documents why this site is built the way it is, and doubles as a demonstration of the Markdown features available to every post.

The requirements

A personal developer blog does not need much:

Fast page loads with no client-side framework
Content written in plain Markdown files
Version control for posts, the same as for code
Free hosting with a simple deploy step
No database, no server, no maintenance

Why Astro

Astro ships zero JavaScript by default. Every page on this site is plain HTML and CSS; the only scripts are a tiny inline theme toggle and a decorative three.js scene on the home page. Content lives in a content collection, so every post’s frontmatter is validated at build time — a typo like publishd fails the build instead of silently breaking the page.

The frontmatter schema is enforced with zod via src/content.config.ts:

const blog = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.{md,mdx}', base: './src/content/blog' }),
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string().min(1),
    publishedAt: z.coerce.date(),
    draft: z.boolean().default(false),
    // ...
  }),
});

Why Cloudflare Workers

Static assets are served free from Cloudflare’s edge network, close to every reader.
Deployment is one command — wrangler deploy uploads the dist/ folder and the site is live seconds later.
The custom 404 page just works, and a custom domain is a one-click setting away.

The whole configuration fits in a few lines of wrangler.jsonc:

{
  "name": "joatandev",
  "compatibility_date": "2026-07-17",
  "assets": {
    "directory": "./dist",
    "not_found_handling": "404-page"
  }
}

What a deploy looks like

npm run build
npx wrangler deploy

That is the entire release process.