After 2 years writing on Dev.to and Medium, I finally decided to build my own blog.
I enjoy the platforms and they were great for a while, but having full control is always better. It took me some time but it was a nice project to ship, and I had fun building it.
This wasn't just about creating the blog, I took the opportunity to rebuild my personal site joacod.com from scratch with a new look and feel as well.
Tech used
I wanted something very fast, no vendor lock-in, static (SSG), and not tied to any specific frontend tech (React, Vue, Svelte, etc), so the choice was an obvious one, I went with Astro, I love this framework and if in the future I need to extend it or add more client side heavy stuff I can do it, it's very powerful and I've been a huge fan of it for a couple of years now.
Other than that, just plain HTML, Tailwind, and vanilla JS. That's it.
Since Astro joined Cloudflare early this year, it felt like a good idea to deploy it there, but there are multiple deployment options (if I ever want to change that), right now it just works for me, and I get an extra layer of security as a bonus.
Did I use AI to create it?
Well, we are in 2026. If you are not using AI to help and improve your work, you are living under a rock, so yeah, of course I use AI.
I like to test different tools and models, so for this I used a mix of the following:
- Claude Code + Opus 4.6 (Anthropic)
- OpenCode + GPT-5.3-Codex (OpenAI)
My coding agent of choice is OpenCode, it's such a great project, if you don't know it and you are using something like Claude Code, I'd suggest you give it a try, it's the same approach, but open source, with better performance. You can also use any model you want with it, it has a lot of different providers you can connect to, and it's very easy to get up and running.
I was a user of Claude Code and Anthropic models for the past 6 months, but this month I switched entirely to the OpenCode + GPT-5.3-Codex combo. It may take you some time to get used to Codex if you are coming from Opus, Codex asks many more questions and requests clarifications (which is good), but if you know what you're doing and give precise directions, the results are amazing.
That said, both options are great, and at this point it's just a matter of personal preference.
Now what?
Having the opportunity to make it work exactly how you want is awesome. So I'll be adding more functionality, little fixes, and creating new stuff that sounds cool to build.
I'll continue writing as always, about the things that interest me, as a form of catharsis, or sharing news from the tech world.
The new blog will be the main canonical source, but I'll keep posting each article on Dev.to and Medium as secondary channels.
It was a good start of the year. It is always good to ship something and see it live. If you have suggestions, comments, or improvements, they are always welcome.
Thanks for reading, and see you on the web!
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