How I Built the howdevs.work Blog

Nov 11, 2025

How I Built the howdevs.work Blog

Building a blog these days feels like it should be simple, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. Sure, you could spin up a WordPress site in minutes, but as developers, we have… opinions. We want performance, we want control, and we definitely want to write in Markdown.

That’s how I ended up building howdevs.work with Astro and Starlight. Here’s the story of how it all came together.

Why Astro + Starlight?

I’ll be honest – I went down the usual rabbit hole of “evaluating frameworks.” You know how it goes: spend three weeks researching the perfect stack instead of just building the thing.

But Astro genuinely made sense for this project:

Performance by default – It ships minimal JavaScript, which means fast page loads
Content-focused – Built for sites exactly like this
Flexible – I can drop in React components if I need them later

Starlight was the real game-changer, though. It’s like someone took all the boring parts of building a docs site (navigation, search, i18n, theming) and just… handled them. Plus it looks great out of the box.

The multilingual challenge

This was the tricky bit. I wanted the blog to work in both English and Hungarian, but I didn’t want to maintain two separate sites.

Starlight’s i18n support turned out to be exactly what I needed. The setup is refreshingly straightforward:

English posts live in src/content/docs/en/blog/
Hungarian posts mirror them in src/content/docs/hu/blog/
Routes get generated automatically: /en/blog/post-title/ and /hu/blog/post-title/

If I don’t have a Hungarian translation ready, it gracefully falls back to English. No broken links, no confused users.

The blog plugin magic

Here’s where things got really nice. Instead of building all the blog functionality myself, I used the starlight-blog plugin. This thing is a lifesaver – it gives you:

Automatic post listings
Author pages (with proper metadata)
Tag filtering
RSS feeds
A clean sidebar with recent posts

Setting up authors was particularly elegant. Instead of hardcoding author info in every post, you define them once in the config:

starlightBlog({
  authors: {
    memergamer: {
      name: 'Kovács Bálint-Hunor',
      title: 'Developer & maintainer',
      picture: 'https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/28981854?v=4',
      url: 'https://www.kovacsbalinthunor.com',
    },
  },
})

Then posts just reference the slug: authors: [memergamer]. Clean and maintainable.

The content workflow

I’m using Astro’s Content Collections, which gives me TypeScript validation for frontmatter. That means if I mess up a date format or forget to add tags, I’ll know at build time.

The schema extends Starlight’s built-in validation with blog-specific fields:

const docs = defineCollection({
  loader: docsLoader(),
  schema: docsSchema({
    extend: (context) => blogSchema(context),
  }),
});

It’s the kind of setup that just works and gets out of your way.

Features that just work

Some things that would’ve taken hours to build from scratch:

Syntax highlighting with Shiki (configured to match the dark theme)
Mermaid diagrams for when I need to explain architecture
Full-text search with Pagefind
Dark mode that respects system preferences
Responsive design that actually works on mobile

What I learned

The biggest surprise was how much time I spent not configuring build tools. Coming from webpack-heavy setups, Astro’s “it just works” approach felt almost suspicious. But that’s the point – it lets you focus on writing instead of wrestling with tooling.

The plugin ecosystem is solid too. Instead of reinventing the wheel for blog functionality, I could leverage existing solutions and focus on the content.

What’s next?

I’ve got a few ideas brewing:

Related posts suggestions
Reading time estimates
Maybe some interactive components for tutorials
Guest author functionality

But honestly? The current setup does exactly what I need. Sometimes the best architecture is the one you don’t have to think about.

Want to contribute?

The whole site is open source. If you’ve got a developer story to share, check out our contribution guide!