Building Static-First in an Era of Dynamism

There is a growing trend to render everything on the server dynamically. With the advent of Edge computing, we're told that dynamic rendering is basically free.

But physics still applies.

No matter how fast your edge function is, it will never beat the speed of serving a pre-compiled static file from a CDN.

For this personal site, I explicitly chose a static-first approach. The site is generated once at build time. There is no database hit when you load this page. There is no server computing the HTML.

But what about dynamic data?

I wanted to show my recent GitHub contributions. Instead of fetching that data from the client (slow, flashes of loading states) or fetching it on the server (requires dynamic rendering), I fetch it during the build process. A script pulls the data, saves it as a static JSON file, and the frontend consumes it.

This hybrid approach—static HTML plus static data artifacts—gives the perception of dynamism with the unshakeable reliability of static hosting.

Sometimes the best architectural decision is deciding not to use the shiny new dynamic tool.