Building This Portfolio: Learning Astro and Git from Scratch
How I went from never using a terminal to deploying a live site
A few weeks ago I did not know what Git was. I had heard the word “clone a repo” before but I did not know what a repo was or how to clone one. Now this site is live, tracked in version control, and pushed to my own GitHub. Here is how that happened.
Starting with Git
The first thing I had to do was clone the template repo from GitHub. That meant:
- Installing Git (it was already on my machine running WSL2)
- Running
git clone <url>to download the project - Learning that a “repo” is just a folder that Git tracks changes in
The mental model that helped me was this: Git is like a save system for your code. Every time you make a meaningful change, you commit it — that creates a snapshot you can always go back to. GitHub is where those snapshots are stored online.
Learning Astro
Astro is a web framework that generates fast static sites. The template I used is built with it. The learning curve was not as steep as I expected because most of the content editing happens in two places:
src/site.config.ts— a single config file where I put my name, bio, social links, and about page contentsrc/content/blog/en/— a folder of Markdown files where each file is one blog post
Markdown is just plain text with some formatting symbols. **bold** makes text bold. # Heading makes a heading. That is basically all you need to write posts.
What I Learned
The biggest thing I learned is that you do not need to understand everything to get started. I do not fully understand how Astro compiles components or how the i18n routing works. But I know enough to edit the config, write posts, run the dev server, and push changes to GitHub.
That is enough to make something real — and making something real is how you learn the rest.
What Is Next
I want to keep adding posts as I progress through TryHackMe and my CompTIA A+ prep. The goal is to turn this portfolio into a living record of my skills — something an employer can look at and see not just what I claim to know, but what I have actually done.
