Table of Contents
This website has recently gone through a complete rewrite. Yes, once again. This time, I made a big change by using Astro, instead of Next.js or React entirely.
And this rewrite was not done just for the sake of doing it, or having a fresh website. While those are good and part of the reasons to do so, the biggest reason is more complex than that.
The events
You see, I’ve always been an advocate of open source, but it comes with a cost and I don’t want to pay for it for now.
My personal website (at least its previous version) has been open source for a while now and a few months ago I started receiving some issues reports about bugs with someone’s fork.
At first it was ok, I provided guidance on resolution, although the project had been shared as-is and I would not be taking much responsibility on the issues other people might have in their forks.
But there was a person that made more reports than average, and that caught my attention so I went to look at their fork of my website.
I was surprised to see that in their fork, they barely edited the content and design and simply put their information in it instead. They even left some wording and paragraphs pretty much exactly the same, also some images, that belong to me, were kept.
I get it. That’s open source sometimes. I don’t mind that. But one would expect people to give their own personal touch to the projects they fork, right? You know, a change of colors here, a change of fonts there, maybe change the layout, the order of things, etc.
This person simply didn’t do any of those things. And it’s frustrating. It’s seeing your work taken away so easily, and in some way, it just feels like my identity, my personal brand, taken away too.
Reaching out
I, of course, wanted to do things right. I reached out to this person asking to, you know, put some effort in changing more than just the content of the website, so that even if they used mine as a template, they’d end up having a truly unique website that feels like theirs.
They agreed and were willing to do such changes. Yet, after months of wait, and even to this day, little changes have been done, and I couldn’t do nothing anymore.
Start again
I thought about it for a while. What could I do to have a solution I felt good with? At the end, the answer was clear for me: update my website, make a new version, make the user interface mine again, give it a renewed personal touch. At the end, the only thing I could control was my own website, not theirs.
For a while, I had seen Astro, found it interesting, but never really used it widely enough to learn and understand it. It was already in my plans for a while, and the timing seemed perfect. So I decided to start again, from scratch, and build a new version of my website using Astro.
Additionally, Tailwind had recently released version 4.0, making it much simpler to use while bringing a whole set of new features I was eager to try, and many performance improvements too.
It was a tough decision, because writing everything again felt exhausting just to think about, I’ll admit it; and it’s probably the reason why I had been procrastinating in doing it for so long. But it was definitely time to.
And what a good decision it was! 😁
The good
Here’s my new website. While I kept many of the user interface elements from the previous one (colors, fonts, styles), I worked hard to make it much simpler, with less complex styling, less random elements that were not used across the entire site, and instead, using a more consistent design.
All of that while giving it a fresh look, minor pieces that I liked and that expressed my identity and personal brand even more, making my website just mine again.
And all of that came with some additional benefits: a tiny, faster website, with almost perfect Lighthouse results, much smaller carbon footprint too and almost no JavaScript usage.
It took some time for sure. I started working on it on August 1st, 2025, and I am only able to consider it finished today, February 27th, 2026.
But it was all worth it. I’m truly happy with the results 😀
The bad
As I started this blog post saying, this website is no longer open source. That is, at least for now. I’m sure I will eventually make it open source again, but you’d have to wait until I rewrite it again 😅, and I doubt it’s happening any time soon.
My previous website, on the other hand, is and will continue being open source. You can find it on GitHub. And if you are interested in a bunch of other previous versions (more than 10 😱) of it, you can also find their source code at the jahirfiquitiva/prev-websites repository.
Conclusion
Sorry for the initial rant, I just wanted to give some context about the decision, and while some might say it’s not such a big deal, writing about it helps.
At the end, all of this just makes me realize that difficulties are just opportunities for greater things, and that though they might seem complex or hard to achieve, you just have to take the leap and do it, cause they’re simply waiting for you.
I have a new website, learnt a bunch of new things in the process, and I’m excited to finally make it official.
If you read this far and/or liked this post, please leave a reaction below 👇 and let me know your thoughts on the new site 😁. I hope you like it as much as I do.
Peace! 🫰