How to Build a Blog as a Solo Developer

What You're Building

A blog is the simplest thing you can build as a developer, and honestly, it's also one of the most underrated. Not the "set up WordPress in 5 minutes" kind. I'm talking about a developer-built blog that loads instantly, costs nothing to host, and gives you complete control over every pixel.

I've built four blogs over the years. The first was WordPress, and it was a mistake I don't want to relive. Slow, bloated, plugin updates every other day. The blog you're reading now runs on Astro. It loads in under a second, hosting costs me zero dollars, and I haven't touched the infrastructure in months.

Difficulty & Timeline

Recommended Tech Stack

Astro with MDX files, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. That's it. No database. No backend. No authentication. Just Markdown files that get compiled to static HTML and served from a CDN globally.

If you want something more dynamic (comments, user accounts, newsletters), you can add those as lightweight services later. But start static. Every blog I've seen fail started with too much complexity on day one.

Step-by-Step Plan

Phase 1: Foundation (Day 1)

Run npm create astro@latest and pick the blog template. You'll have a working blog in under two minutes. Seriously. Customize the layout, add your branding, set up your content collections with proper frontmatter validation. Astro makes this almost painfully easy.

Don't obsess over the design. I spent three weekends tweaking CSS on my first blog before I had a single post. That's backwards. The design should take a few hours at most. Nobody is visiting your blog to admire the sidebar.

Phase 2: Write Content First (Day 1-2)

Before you touch anything else, write three real posts. Not placeholder lorem ipsum. Actual content that someone would want to read. This does two things. First, it forces you to test your content workflow end to end. Second, it gives you something to launch with.

Writing in Markdown inside VS Code is faster than any CMS I've ever used. You get version control for free, your content lives in your Git repo, and there's nothing to maintain.

Phase 3: Deploy and Add Analytics (Day 2)

Connect your GitHub repo to Cloudflare Pages. Every push auto-deploys. Add Plausible or Umami for privacy-friendly analytics. Set up your RSS feed (Astro has a plugin for this). Done.

Cloudflare Pages gives you unlimited bandwidth on the free tier. Not a generous limit. Unlimited. I've served hundreds of thousands of pageviews without paying a cent.

Key Features to Build First

Build these and nothing else for launch.

Content collections with frontmatter. Tags, categories, publish dates, SEO metadata. Astro validates all of this at build time so you catch errors before they go live.

RSS feed. People still use RSS, especially in the developer community. It takes five minutes to set up with @astrojs/rss.

SEO basics. Meta tags, Open Graph images, canonical URLs, a sitemap. This is table stakes and Astro handles most of it out of the box.

Search. A simple client-side search using something like Pagefind. It indexes your static content at build time and adds search with zero runtime cost.

Architecture Overview

There's barely any architecture to discuss, and that's the beauty of it. Markdown files in a folder. A build step that converts them to HTML. A CDN that serves the HTML globally.

/src/content/blog/     -> Your posts (MDX files)
/src/pages/            -> Your routes (index, about, blog listing)
/src/layouts/          -> Page templates
/public/               -> Static assets (images, fonts)

No servers. No databases. No containers. No Kubernetes. If your blog needs Kubernetes, something has gone terribly wrong.

Common Pitfalls

Starting with WordPress. If you're a developer, WordPress is a trap. You're managing PHP you don't want to touch, updating plugins that slow your site down, and paying for a server you don't need. A static site generator gives you better performance at zero cost.

Over-engineering from day one. You don't need a headless CMS, a database, user accounts, or a comment system to launch a blog. You need content. Everything else can come later.

Not writing consistently. I've seen developers build beautiful blogs and then post twice before abandoning them. The tech stack doesn't matter if you don't write. Set a schedule, even if it's just one post per month, and stick to it.

Ignoring SEO entirely. You don't need to be an SEO expert, but basic stuff matters. Good titles, meta descriptions, proper heading hierarchy, fast load times. Astro gives you most of this for free, but you still need to write titles people actually want to click.

Building a custom CMS. I've done this. It took weeks and the Markdown-in-VS-Code workflow was better. If you really want a browser-based editor, use Decap CMS or Tina CMS. They add a visual editor that commits to your Git repo. Best of both worlds without building anything custom.

Timeline Estimate

Is This Worth Building?

Absolutely. A blog is the single best long-term investment a solo developer can make. It builds your personal brand, drives organic traffic to your other projects, establishes you as an authority in your niche, and compounds over time. Posts I wrote two years ago still bring in traffic every single day.

The key insight is that a developer blog should be boring infrastructure. Simple, fast, reliable, free. Save your complexity budget for the projects you actually want to build. Your blog is the megaphone, not the main event.