Building andrewchemis.dev

When I set out to build this site, I had a few goals: make it fast, keep it simple, and use it as a learning opportunity for AWS CDK. Here's how it came together.

Design philosophy

I wanted a site that loads instantly and focuses on content. No JavaScript frameworks, no web fonts to download, no tracking scripts. Just HTML, CSS, and the content itself.

The design is inspired by All Things Distributed and other minimal developer blogs. System fonts, a monochromatic palette, and a maximum width of 70 characters for readability.

Infrastructure

The site runs on AWS:

• S3 — Stores the static files
• CloudFront — CDN for fast global delivery
• AWS CDK — Infrastructure as code
• GitHub Actions — CI/CD pipeline via cdk-pipelines-github

The entire infrastructure is defined in TypeScript using AWS CDK. Every push to main triggers a deployment. No manual steps, no configuration drift.

Performance

The result speaks for itself:

• First Contentful Paint: <0.5s
• Total page weight: <10KB
• Zero JavaScript required for core functionality
• Perfect Lighthouse score

Source code

The entire project is open source on GitHub. Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own site.