2026: Finally a New Decent Website

There’s something about the holidays that sparks productivity. Between updating Home Assistant automations and untangling the home network configuration that had accumulated cruft over the past year, I finally tackled a project that had been on my list for far too long: rebuilding my personal website.

The Stack

Let me break down the tech choices behind this rebuild.

Astro: The Framework

Astro has become my go-to for content-focused sites. The philosophy is simple: ship less JavaScript, render more at build time. For a personal portfolio with a blog, it’s perfect.

# That's it. That's the whole framework.
npm create astro@latest

What I love about Astro:

Content Collections: Type-safe markdown handling out of the box
Island Architecture: JavaScript only where you need it
Zero JS by default: Pages are static HTML unless you explicitly add interactivity
First-class Tailwind support: Design directly in your templates

AI-Assisted Development: The New Workflow

Here’s where things get interesting. This entire site was built with heavy AI assistance, and I’m not just talking about generating placeholder text.

Gemini Canvas helped with initial design exploration and visual concepts. The ability to iterate on layouts visually before writing code saved hours of back-and-forth.

But the real game-changer? Claude Opus 4.5.

I don’t say this lightly: Opus 4.5 is the new heaven for development workflows. The combination of deep context understanding, code generation quality, and reasoning capabilities makes it feel like pair programming with a senior developer who never gets tired and has read every documentation page ever written.

# Actual workflow:
1. Describe what I want
2. Review generated code
3. Iterate with feedback
4. Ship & Deploy in Cloudflare

The traditional cycle of “Google/DuckDuckGoit, Stack Overflow, try, fail, repeat” is becoming obsolete. Not entirely (you still need to understand what you’re building) but the friction between idea and implementation has dropped dramatically.

Cloudflare: The Infrastructure

Deploying static sites in 2026 is remarkably straightforward. Cloudflare Pages handles:

Global CDN: Your site served from 300+ locations worldwide
Automatic deployments: Push to Git, site updates
SSL/TLS: Handled automatically
Preview deployments: Every PR gets its own URL

Now, let me be honest: Cloudflare has had some notable incidents recently. The “most reliable infrastructure” claim has taken a few hits. But for personal projects, the value proposition remains compelling. Free tier, fast deployments, and when it works (which is 99% of the time), it works beautifully.

# wrangler.toml - that's the entire config
name = "sebastianomontino"
compatibility_date = "2026-01-01"

The Design

The visual direction came from wanting something that felt editorial: clean typography, thoughtful spacing, and just enough personality without being distracting.

Key design decisions:

Dark theme: Easier on the eyes, especially for code-heavy content
Serif typography for headings: Playfair Display adds warmth to technical content
Minimal color palette: Blue accents on a neutral base
Mouse-following subtle glow: A touch of interactivity without being obnoxious

Closing a Chapter: Androidiani.com

This holiday season also marked the end of an era. In December 2025, we officially closed Androidiani.com after 17 years.

What started in 2008 as a small forum for Android enthusiasts grew into Italy’s largest Android community, reaching over 650,000 registered users and 250,000 daily sessions at its peak. We built custom tools, covered every Android release from Cupcake to the latest versions, and created a space where Italian tech enthusiasts could connect and learn.

Seventeen years is a long time for any project. The community landscape changed, social media fragmented attention, and maintaining the infrastructure became increasingly difficult to justify. It was time.

Looking back, Androidiani taught me more about web development, community building, and scaling systems than any course or job ever could. It was my playground, my laboratory, and for a long time, my biggest source of technical growth. The skills I use today in my data and innovation work were forged in late-night debugging sessions on that platform.

Thank you to everyone who was part of that journey.