Hello, good evening, good morning everyone. It’s been a while — Masa here.
It’s honestly been over five years since I last wrote a post on the blog.
The look, design and page structure are pretty much the same, but I’ve rebuilt the “inside” from the ground up.
Yes — I’ve finally said goodbye to WordPress! So what stack am I using now? Here’s a quick tour.
CMS / Backend — Strapi
I wanted to run everything on my own GCP (GCE) instance, so I chose Strapi as the headless CMS.
As a Node.js OSS headless CMS, it’s become something of a standard, hasn’t it?
No special customisation here — just a simple, straightforward setup.
Frontend — Next.js
The frontend is Next.js, kept simple with SSR at the core.
My background is heavier on Vue/Nuxt, but I went with Next to sharpen that skillset as well.
This blog doesn’t demand anything too fancy, so it also serves as a learning exercise.
- Using the App Router
- Let SSR handle data fetching; only light local state where needed
- No explicit use of Context or Redux
To be honest, for a blog like this, Astro might be even more efficient these days.
Astro’s a cracking bit of kit.
Data Layer — GraphQL
Since Strapi provides a tidy GraphQL setup, I went with GraphQL.
With GraphQL Codegen, it’s easy on the frontend to generate TypeScript types and hooks — works a treat with Strapi.
AI-driven Development
As a bit of a test, I tried to lean on generative AI as much as possible this time.
My prompt-engineering chops aren’t quite there yet, so the generated code didn’t always behave — mildly frustrating at times —
but I picked up plenty of lessons and I’d still call it a worthwhile approach. I’m keen to level up my prompting and use it more efficiently.
There are loads of AI-enabled editors around now, but I’m sticking with JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA.
This year JetBrains added Junie (features similar to Cursor or Cline) into the IDE, and I pushed it as far as my tokens would allow.
I also used ChatGPT alongside.
Wrap-up
That’s a quick note to say the blog’s had a refresh.
I reckon it’s snappier than in the WordPress days.
I’ll be cracking on with personal projects to bolster my portfolio, and I’m planning to jot down the process, little realisations and takeaways here as and when.
See you soon!
P.S. The thumbnail, rather splendidly, was conjured up by ChatGPT itself.