Welcome to The Other Computer!

After a long bout of procrastination and going back and forth between different possibilities, I combined my SmugMug astrophoto portfolio and Chasing Ghosts amateur astronomy blog to form this new site, where I will host my photos and post about my various projects, including but not limited to amateur astronomy.

All posts from the Chasing Ghosts blog are included here for archival purposes. Unfortunately they are only in Finnish, but all new content will be written in English. I apologize for any broken links in the old blog posts, they are sometimes hard to spot and correct.

I tested out many different technology stacks when building this website. I wanted to keep the site fast, easy to host and easy to develop, so I naturally gravitated towards static page generators. From my working life I was pretty familiar with JavaScript and React, so it ended up being a difficult choice between Next.js and Gatsby.

I was drawn to the minimalist approach of Next.js. At a glance Gatsby felt pretty daunting and bulky. I built the site pretty far with Next.js, but bumped into frustrating issues with handling image resizing and optimizing among other things. Many of the 3rd party plugins and libraries did not feel very mature either. I was building a relatively image-heavy site, so I wanted to make manipulating images as painless as possible. In the end I ported the site to Gatsby and did not regret it.

Page styling is done with a component-based approach using Styled Components and no off-the-shelf CSS frameworks.