Life: Astro Rebuild, Remote Realities
Astro rebuilds, a pesky flicker, and reflections on remote work, job uncertainty, and writing for serendipitous readers.
I finally finished converting the blog to Astro. It’s gone through multiple iterations now. First it was on Gatsby, then it was on Svelte, then it was on Nuxt/Vue with ssg, and now it’s on Astro with React. Each move solved a particular problem that either made things simpler and more reliable, or solved a problem/defect. The Latest one with Nuxt kept causing the blog pages to have their formatting broken any time I refreshed the page or did a direct reload, which required me to wrap the blog content in a client only tag, and as a consequence broke the SEO optimizations… Lots of that is probably gibberish to anyone that isn’t a coder but oh well… (Amusement)
The main drawback to Astro seems to be this page flickering on every navigation. I’m not quite sure now Nuxt solved that issue with it’s own static site generation (SSG), but Astro seems to be having problems with it. It’s likely Nuxt had a SPA like shell/wrapper that it kept on the client side for the main static elements like the side nav and the header, and only swapped out the central comment by requesting that section from the server on navigation, but I thought Astro had something similar especially with their latest 5.0 release. Either way, Vue, React, and Astro are a little out of my wheelhouse as I’m primarily a professional Angular + .NET developer but I’m happy with the site and I fixed all the issues. Now the share button works properly without any styling breaking, and the brief flicker is manageable. Programming complex applications in Angular gets me familiar with SPA responsiveness and aesthetics so the flickering from a static site blog is alien to me - (Amusement)
Anyway, enough of that.
Life is going well. Though I think I might lose my job soon - (Amusement). (Shrugs). Not for incompetence, I’m actually one of their most competent developers on the project I’m on, and they turn to me for any complex UI requirements always. But rather, because my direct company is rather anal retentive and very bureaucratic and I’m not a very good fit. I told them if they wanted to keep me then it had to be ‘remote’ only, which they agreed too, but remote only in their opinion was a 1k mile range, my version was ‘worldwide’, so because I’m not in range and refuse to go back it’s causing ‘compliance issues’ - (Shrugs).
Is what it is. I’m where the client company wanted me though… lol. I honestly like my client company more than I like my parent company. It’s all good though, I’m sure whatever is meant to happen will happen, and things will work out for the better no matter how they play out. Still sort of wish just meditating and occasionally blogging about anything I want to blog about could support me, I sure in some reality it could. And if I put more effort into trying to attract an audience, but honestly that sounds kinda exhausting - (Shrugs). It will happen if it’s meant to happen and in the mean time those that find my words and get any sort of value from them are all that matter. I predominately write for myself, and those who are cosmically destined to stumble across me like a tiny message in a bottle thrown out into the vast ocean. If you are here, and you are reading this. Hi. The universe would just like to let you know you’re awesome and keep up the good work.
Anyway, that’s about it. For now, peace and farewell.