Introduction

I wanted this portfolio to load fast, be easy to maintain, and not depend on a stack of services I’d have to babysit. That landed me on three tools: Astro to build the site, GitHub to track and version the code, and Cloudflare to register the domain and host the result.

Why Astro

Astro ships static HTML by default and only adds JavaScript where a page actually needs it, which fits a content-heavy portfolio like this one — projects, writing, certifications, work history. Content collections handle the projects, writing, and certifications sections as typed Markdown, validated against a schema at build time. If a project’s frontmatter is missing a required field, the build fails immediately instead of shipping a broken page. That caught more than a few typos early on.

Version Control with GitHub

Every change to the site — new projects, copy edits, layout tweaks — goes through GitHub. Having a real commit history makes it easy to see what changed and when, and to roll something back if a change doesn’t work out. It also means the entire site, content included, lives in one place instead of being split across a CMS and a codebase.

Domain and Hosting on Cloudflare

The domain itself is registered through Cloudflare, which also handles DNS and serves the site over its CDN. Cloudflare Pages builds the site straight from the GitHub repository — push to main, and the static output is live shortly after. The contact form on this site also runs as a small Cloudflare Pages Function, with Cloudflare Turnstile handling bot protection before the message goes out.

Key Takeaways

Astro kept the site fast and the content structured; GitHub kept the history honest; Cloudflare kept the domain, hosting, and deployment pipeline in one place. None of these choices were about chasing the newest tool — they were about keeping a personal site simple enough that maintaining it doesn’t become its own project.

Isaac Davenport is an IT Systems Engineer specializing in identity and access management, endpoint administration, and SaaS infrastructure.