Renewing rafablanes.com: Astro, Cloudflare and a simpler website

I created rafablanes.com in 2013 to build my own professional brand and to include information about my first published book (The Programmer’s Black Book), along with those that would follow.

However, there are times when maintaining something stops making much sense, and it becomes more interesting to rethink how we would do it if we were starting from scratch today. That is, to a large extent, exactly what I have done with rafablanes.com, disregarding everything that has happened since that year.

For years my website was built on Drupal, a framework that thrilled me at the time, and I even gave a talk about it at a DrupalCamp back in 2015.

However, that Drupal site has already served its purpose. The content I want to publish and, above all, the direction in which I want to evolve professionally called for a deeper renewal than a simple redesign.

So I decided to rebuild it completely, as one of my goals for this year, something I have been doing little by little since last summer.

From Drupal to Astro

The most important change is probably something you can’t see at first glance: the technology used to build the site, which, I have to admit, left me completely thrilled after evaluating the alternatives.

I have replaced Drupal with Astro, a framework designed for building content-focused websites that can generate mostly static pages. For a site like this, where most of what I publish is articles, information about my books and technical content, this approach fits what I currently need much better.

This is not about switching technology just to use something newer (I have always hated and criticized going with the latest thing just because). My goal has been to reduce complexity, both in publishing and in deploying new content.

Drupal is a very complete platform, but precisely many of its capabilities stopped being necessary for my use case. I now prefer an architecture where the content takes center stage and where I can keep a much more direct relationship between what I write and what ends up published.

The new site aims for exactly that: to be simpler.

Cloudflare for a different kind of deployment

The renewal also affects the way I publish the site. The new version is deployed using Cloudflare, leaving behind the traditional hosting model I had used before.

This change fits the same philosophy behind the whole renewal: simplifying the infrastructure I need to maintain and bringing the project closer to a more current way of developing and deploying web applications.

Astro and Cloudflare are, of course, not goals in themselves. They are simply the tools I have chosen to build a site that better serves what I want to do with it.

Besides, with Cloudflare I make sure, with a minimal investment, that the read latency of my site is extraordinarily low no matter which part of the world it is accessed from.

A website that also reflects a change

But perhaps the most important part of this renewal is not technological. This change is also, without a doubt, a reflection of my professional evolution.

One of the reasons for rebuilding the site was to better organize the topics I want to write about over the coming years. Software engineering and development remain a fundamental part of its content, as could not be otherwise after so many years working professionally in software.

Now, however, there is another area that is becoming increasingly important to me: quantum computing, a discipline I have been working on for several years.

My interest and specialization in this discipline are leading me to study new models of computation, algorithms and ways of approaching problems that considerably expand the usual territory of classical programming. Therefore, it made sense for my website to evolve to make room for that journey as well.

That is why the renewal is not only about modernizing the technology behind rafablanes.com. It also seeks to build a space better prepared to bring together what is already part of my career with what I am working on and delving into now.

Replacing Drupal with Astro, changing how the site is deployed or rethinking its structure are technical decisions. What really matters lies elsewhere: the content.

Here I will keep writing about software, programming, architecture and technology. There will also be more and more room for quantum computing, its fundamentals, its algorithms and its evolution.

The site is new. The topics are evolving too. But the intention remains essentially the same: to use this space to write, learn and share what I consider interesting enough to devote a few pages to.

And this new version of rafablanes.com is, simply, a better place to do it.

Finally, as a result of my own professional evolution, all the content is also available in English.