June 20, 2026

Overview

SoloDevStack is my programmatic-SEO blog aimed at solo developers and indie builders. I built it to rank for the buyer-intent queries people type when they are choosing a stack, a tool, or an approach for shipping on their own. It runs hundreds of posts, the majority of them head-to-head tool comparisons, and it is self-hosted on my own infrastructure.

What It Does

The site is built around buyer-intent and comparison content. Most of the catalog is "X vs Y for solo developers" comparisons, alongside build guides, tech-stack breakdowns, and game-development write-ups. Each post is a standalone MDX file with its own hero image, structured data, and table of contents, so the whole thing scales to a large library of pages without a heavyweight CMS behind it.

• Programmatic comparison library: Hundreds of posts, with tool comparisons making up the bulk, plus build guides, tech stacks, and game-dev content.
• File-based CMS: An admin panel for managing posts without a database, with content stored as MDX files.
• Client-side search: Fast in-browser search across the catalog.
• Categories and tags: Auto-extracted from frontmatter, with category and tag listing pages generated automatically.
• Full SEO stack: Schema.org structured data (BlogPosting, breadcrumbs, optional FAQ and HowTo), RSS feed, and a generated sitemap.

Tech Stack

• Framework: Astro 5 with the Node adapter
• Content: MDX and Markdoc
• Styling: Tailwind CSS
• SEO: Schema.org structured data, RSS, sitemap
• Deployment: Self-hosted on Kubernetes (K3s)

Why I Built This

I wanted a content engine that could grow to a large number of pages without turning into a maintenance problem. Astro lets me keep every post as a plain MDX file, prerender the whole site to static output, and still get perfect structured data for search. The comparison format fits how solo developers actually search, by weighing one option against another, so it is a natural fit for programmatic SEO done at volume.