Ed Stuurman

Part 1 — Customizing This Astro Theme: Separating Identity, Narrative, and Datasets from Templates

A practical guide to cloning, running, and customizing this Astro 7 + Tailwind CSS v4 site for your own domain—without ever editing a single .astro template.When I first built this site on Astro and Tailwind CSS, it started the way most personal engineering sites do: my name, domain, bio paragraphs, social links, and navigation items were scattered directly across a dozen .astro page templates, layout shells, and utility scripts.

Part 2 — Provisioning & Deploying the Multi-Region AWS Stack with Terraform and GitLab CI/CD

How to provision globally replicated AWS S3 buckets, a Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP), native CloudFront SigV4a Origin Access Control (OAC), ACM SSL, and Route 53 DNS using Terraform 1.10+ and GitLab CI/CD.In late 2025, I wrote two posts about hosting this site across multiple AWS regions using an S3 Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP) behind CloudFront (manual setup and initial Terraform configuration). Back then, connecting CloudFront to an S3 MRAP required deploying a custom Python Lambda@Edge function in us-east-1 just to re-sign origin requests with SigV4a.

Chinese Whispers, Letraset Sheets, and the Real Story Behind Lorem Ipsum

Why "aws s3 sync" Was Re-Uploading My Entire Site on Every Push (And How We Fixed Our CI/CD Pipeline)

How two sneaky CI/CD traps—npm ci wiping build caches inside node_modules and fresh build mtimes fooling aws s3 sync—turned one-line edits into full 592-file multi-region deployments.When I moved this site off Amplify and onto a globally replicated S3 Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP) behind CloudFront, I thought the CI/CD pipeline was about as simple and done as a static site pipeline gets: build Astro in one stage, run aws s3 sync . s3://my-bucket/ --delete in the next, invalidate CloudFront, and call it a day.

Stepping Back, Digging In, and Stepping Forward

Reflections on a two-year hiatus, rebuilding mental bandwidth, and stepping back into production infrastructure.Two years ago, I logged off. In an industry obsessed with relentless upward velocity, constant commits, and measuring personal worth by the freshness of your profile activity, deliberately stepping away feels almost unnatural. If you don’t broadcast what you’re shipping every quarter, the prevailing tech myth suggests your engineering instincts will rust away overnight.

From Static Tags to a Living CV: Pair-Programming a Site Architecture with AI

How linking career milestones, homelab notes, and photography through simple tags sets up cleaner CV generation—and what pair-programming with AI as an amateur actually feels like.Most personal engineering websites treat tags as an afterthought. You write an article, slap five lowercase keywords at the bottom, and end up with a predictable cloud of #kubernetes or #javascript links that lead to thin archive pages. Case in point: I do this all the time.

Overhauling the Stack: Astro 7, Tailwind v4, and Converting to AI-Assisted Engineering

How a routine framework upgrade turned into a full modernization sprint—and why I finally became a believer in AI pair programming.Back in late 2025, when I first spun up this website, I wrote a post about falling down the static-site rabbit hole. The goal back then was simple: get a clean, automated pipeline going with Astro, push markdown to git, and let the cloud handle the rest. It did the job, but like any side project left running for a while, dependencies fell behind, layout patterns aged poorly, and the technical debt started piling up.