Hello (Again), World!
Author
Philip Domingo
Date Published
Fun fact: "Hello, World!" is a foundational, simple computer program that displays the phrase "Hello, World!" to verify a programming environment is working correctly.
It's year 2026, and I've decided to revive my www.prtdomingo.com website. This time around, with more emphasis on making the technical side of things simpler, as I want to focus more of my attention on the content I can write here, rather than having additional operational overhead maintaining the platform.
Old Site
My old site ran on Microsoft Azure using a headless CMS architecture.
At one point, it looked like this:
- Ghost CMS on a Linux VM (only runs when I need to write new blog posts)
- GatsbyJS, a React-based framework that transforms my Ghost CMS content into static files (.html, .css, and .js), which are then deployed to Azure Static Web Apps.
- Azure Blob Storage + CDN for assets
- Azure DevOps CI/CD triggered via webhooks
In short, I built a serverless (for the most part) infrastructure for my personal website.
Was it a lot of work? Initially, yes.
Was it expensive? Not really—just around 2–3 Starbucks coffees per month for maintaining the infrastructure, with roughly a thousand visitors per month.
Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. The solution architect in me loved every bit of it.
New Site
Whereas this new site - in which my main focus is content, it's straightforward.
The new site runs on Payload 3.0 CMS, with a one-click deployment option via Vercel. That’s it.
No CI/CD pipeline configuration. No Azure deployment. Just what's already available out-of-the-box.
Just write and publish.
The rest of the work that I needed to do was just designing my logo, favicon, and banners in Canva. Especially that I am sometimes too fussy about my designs (*insert graphic design is my passion meme*).
The only thing I paid for is my prtdomingo.com domain which costs around ~$10 USD/year. The rest, I'm still taking advantage of the free tier, which is more than enough for me, at least for now.
What's the plan from here?
One of my personal goals in life is to build at least 7 income streams (I'm working on my 4th now).
This means that, moving forward, I wanted to use this website as a distribution channel—a compounding asset that can:
- Potentially expand my network
- Attract opportunities to come to me, with the hopes of writing quality content that benefits the people reading my blog posts
- Keep myself curious for building things
I'm also a strong believer that being successful in life, does not necessarily mean being successful in only one or two aspects in life (such as in career and/or finances). I strongly believe that being successful in life means, being successful in every aspect of your life. Such as in your career, finances, health, relationships, and most importantly, your spiritual life.
What this means is that, for the contents I might be writing in my blog posts, might cut across different topics from time to time. From tech, to finances, to whatever topic that makes me excited and keeps me awake at night.
With that, hello (again), world.