The old reid.wiki had impressive plumbing — Docker images, ECR, ECS services, an ALB — and content that said “Next Milestone (2025)” in the summer of 2026. The infrastructure was never the reason it went stale. The workflow was: updating a project status meant editing YAML frontmatter, committing, pushing, PR-ing, and waiting for a container build.
So the rebuild optimizes for the update path:
- Astro replaces Jekyll/Minimal Mistakes. Content is typed markdown collections; project status/category/stack are structured data that render as the status dots and indexes you see across the site. No theme to fight.
- S3 + CloudFront replace the container stack. A static site in a bucket, fronted by the wildcard cert. The previous architecture was educational; this one is invisible.
- GitHub Actions builds and syncs on every push. Hashed assets get immutable cache headers; HTML revalidates in about a minute, so no cache invalidations are needed at all.
- Sveltia CMS at /admin/ is the real fix. It’s a browser panel over the git repo — sign in with a GitHub token, edit a project’s status from a dropdown, hit save. The commit and deploy happen behind the scenes. Ten-second updates, full version history, nothing new to operate.
The projects section also got reorganized around honesty: every project carries a live status — active, ongoing, paused, or complete — and “paused” is used without shame. A portfolio where everything is eternally “in active development” is a portfolio nobody updates.