LifeLog is born — the blog that documents the journey

Why another blog?

I’ve spent the last months building — Arachne, Capivara, Dogwalk, TatuEngine, portfolio. Each project generated decisions, bugs, pivots, learnings. But it all stayed in my head or, at best, in scattered Obsidian notes no one else saw.

Then I caught myself thinking: how many times did I solve a hard problem, document the solution in a .md file inside the repo, and months later not even remember I’d written it?

It’s not about ego or “building an audience.” It’s about:

Public record — the decisions I made, the mistakes I committed, the wins that worked
Future reference — 6 months from now, I want to search “how did I deploy Arachne on VPS?” and find the post
Discipline — writing forces mental organization. If I can’t explain it, I haven’t understood it
Exchange — maybe someone stumbles on a post and saves hours of debugging

The name LifeLog came naturally. It’s not a traditional blog with editorial and agenda — it’s the dev life log. What I’m doing, what I’m learning, what went wrong.

The stack — Astro 7 + MDX

Choosing the stack was faster than expected. I already knew Astro from other projects, and version 7 brought:

Typed Content Collections with Zod schema — validated frontmatter at build
Native MDX — JSX inside markdown without extra plugins
Shiki syntax highlighting with automatic light/dark themes
Zero JS by default — posts are pure HTML, only load scripts if interactive

# Creating the project took minutes
npm create astro@latest lifelog -- --template basics
npx astro add mdx
npx astro add tailwind

The post schema was lean:

// src/content/config.ts
import { defineCollection, z } from 'astro:content'

const posts = defineCollection({
  type: 'content',
  schema: z.object({
  title: z.string(),
  description: z.string(),
  date: z.date(),
  pubDate: z.date().optional(),
  project: z.enum(['arachne', 'dogwalk', 'portfolio', 'capivara',
  'tatuengine', 'estudos', 'descobertas']),
  tags: z.array(z.string()),
  icon: z.string().optional(),
  cover: z.string().optional(),
  featured: z.boolean().default(false),
  draft: z.boolean().default(false),
  }),
})

Each post becomes a route automatically. The typing is so strong that if I misspell a tag name in the frontmatter, the build breaks. This prevents the “messy blog” that most abandon after 3 posts.

Why not Notion / Substack / Medium?

I’ve used them all. Always the same story: excited start, write 4 posts, the platform changes its layout, my links break, the lock-in annoys me, I abandon it.

With Astro + MDX:

.mdx files in a directory — portable to any stack
Git versioned — every post has change history
Static build — deploy anywhere (Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, S3)
No database, no CMS, no dashboard — just git push