Obiz Solutions — this very site

This is the site you’re reading right now. The goal: a place to share systems, solutions, and things I’ve learned, available in English (default) and Vietnamese, fast to load, and close to zero to run.

Architecture

The path from writing a post to a reader seeing it:

1. Content — posts are Markdown files under src/content/{blog,projects,docs}, each with a matching en/ and vi/ translation.
2. A git push to main triggers the GitHub Actions workflow.
3. GitHub Actions installs dependencies, runs astro check then astro build — Astro reads the Content Collections and renders every page to static HTML under dist/.
4. Actions authenticates to AWS via OIDC (no long-lived access keys stored anywhere), then runs aws s3 sync dist/ s3://bucket --delete to sync the latest build and remove stale files.
5. CloudFront sits in front of the S3 bucket, serving content over a CDN with HTTPS; Actions calls create-invalidation to clear the cache right after each deploy.
6. The visitor’s browser gets back static HTML with next to no JavaScript, thanks to Astro’s Islands Architecture — see What is Astro? for more.

Content model

The three collections — blog, projects, docs — share one convention: each entry is a Markdown file under an en/ or vi/ folder, with frontmatter validated by a Zod schema in src/content/config.ts (see What is TypeScript? for why that matters). A wrong type or a missing field fails at astro build time, before it can ever reach production.

Bilingual routing

Astro’s i18n routing makes English the default (root route /), with Vietnamese under a /vi/ prefix. The LanguageSwitcher component computes the equivalent path in the other language from the current URL, and the Header figures out which nav item is active from Astro.url.pathname.

Why this stack

• Astro: the site is mostly content — no need for a heavy SPA runtime.
• S3 + CloudFront: cheap static hosting, no server to manage, scales on its own.
• GitHub Actions + OIDC: every push deploys automatically, without storing AWS access keys anywhere — less credential-leak surface.

What could be improved

There’s no full-text search or RSS feed for the blog yet — not needed with a handful of posts, but both are reasonable additions once there’s more content.