Supercharging Your Blog Development Experience

Writing blog posts should be a joy, not a chore. But too often, the friction of file creation, frontmatter formatting, and manual processes gets in the way of what really matters: sharing your ideas with the world.

Today, I'm excited to share how I transformed my blog's developer experience with a suite of custom tools that make content creation seamless and enjoyable. These improvements were built collaboratively with Claude, turning tedious tasks into smooth workflows.

The Problems I Faced

Before these improvements, creating a new blog post involved:

• Manually creating markdown files with specific naming conventions
• Copy-pasting frontmatter from other posts (and forgetting fields)
• Running separate commands to generate social media images
• No validation until build time (when errors were cryptic)
• Constant browser refreshing to see changes
• Searching through posts with basic grep commands

Sound familiar? Let's fix that.

1. Blog Post CLI Tool: Zero to Draft in Seconds

The first tool I built (with Claude's help designing the interface) was a CLI for creating new posts. No more manual file creation or frontmatter copy-paste:

bun run new-post "Your Amazing Post Title" -D "A compelling description" -t tag1 -t tag2

This single command:

- Generates a URL-friendly slug automatically
- Creates the markdown file with proper frontmatter
- Sets up all required fields (author, date, etc.)
- Opens the file in your editor
- Even supports draft mode with the `-d` flag

Here's what happens behind the scenes:

```typescript
// Automatic slug generation
const generateSlug = (title: string): string => {
  return title
    .toLowerCase()
    .replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/g, '-')
    .replace(/^-+|-+$/g, '');
};

The tool uses Bun's native `parseArgs` for a clean CLI interface and automatically fills in smart defaults like today's date.

## 2. Hot Module Replacement for Markdown

Remember the days of manual browser refreshing? They're gone. My custom Vite plugin now watches markdown files and triggers instant updates:

```typescript
// In vite-markdown-plugin.ts
async handleHotUpdate({ file, server }) {
  if (file.endsWith('.md')) {
    console.log(`📝 Markdown file updated: ${path.basename(file)}`);
    const module = server.moduleGraph.getModuleById(file);
    if (module) {
      server.moduleGraph.invalidateModule(module);
      return [module];
    }
  }
}

Now when you save a markdown file:

- The browser instantly refreshes
- Your content appears immediately
- Social images regenerate automatically
- No build restart needed

## 3. Frontmatter Validation: Catch Errors Early

Nothing's worse than a cryptic build error 20 minutes into writing. The frontmatter validator catches issues immediately:

```typescript
// Real validation in action
if (!frontmatter.author) {
  errors.push({
    field: 'author',
    message: 'Author is required',
    suggestion: 'Add: author: "Jonathan Haas"'
  });
}

The validator provides:

- Clear error messages with exact field names
- Helpful suggestions for fixes
- Warnings for SEO optimization (like description length)
- Detection of common typos (e.g., "publishDate" → "pubDate")

## 4. Local Content Search: Find Anything, Fast

Ever tried to find that one post where you mentioned a specific concept? The search tool makes it instant:

```bash
## Search everywhere
bun run search "developer experience"

## Search only in titles
bun run search "devex" --title

## Search in content with context
bun run search "validation" -c

## Case-sensitive search
bun run search "DevEx" -C

The search tool features:

- Colored output with highlighted matches
- Relevance scoring (title matches score higher)
- Line numbers for content matches
- Configurable result limits

Here's what searching looks like in action:

```bash
$ bun run search "devex" -l 3

🔍 Searching for "devex" in 79 posts...

Found 2 matching posts (showing top 3):

1. Supercharging Your Blog Development Experience
   📄 supercharging-your-blog-development-experience.md
   📝 Line 23: Learn how I transformed my blog's devex with custom tools
   🏷️  tags: developer-experience

1. Building Better Developer Tools
   📄 building-better-developer-tools.md
   📌 title: Building Better DevEx Tools for Modern Teams

## 5. VS Code Integration

I just added VS Code workspace settings and snippets:

- Custom markdown snippets for common patterns
- Workspace-specific settings for this blog
- Integration with the validation tools
- Quick actions for common tasks

## 6. Cloudflare Pages DevEx: Deploy with Confidence

Since my blog deploys on Cloudflare Pages, I've added specific tooling for a smooth deployment experience:

### Local Preview Matching Production

```bash
## Preview exactly how your blog will look on Cloudflare Pages
bun run preview:cf

This command:

- Builds with production optimizations
- Serves using Wrangler's Pages dev server
- Tests edge functions locally
- Validates KV namespaces and environment variables

### GitHub Actions for Automated Deployments

I've set up comprehensive GitHub Actions workflows:

**Preview Deployments** (`deploy-preview.yml`):

- Triggers on pull requests
- Runs type checking and linting
- Deploys to unique preview URL
- Comments the preview link directly on PRs
- Automatic cleanup when PR is closed

**Production Deployments** (`deploy-production.yml`):

- Triggers on pushes to main
- Full quality checks before deployment
- Cache purging for instant updates
- Deployment status tracking

**Quality Checks** (`quality-checks.yml`):

- TypeScript and ESLint validation
- Frontmatter validation across all posts
- Bundle size monitoring
- Security scanning for secrets
- RSS feed verification

### Environment-Specific Configurations

The build scripts handle environment differences:

```typescript
// scripts/build-env.ts
const isCloudflarePages = process.env.CF_PAGES === '1';

if (isCloudflarePages) {
  // Use CF Pages specific optimizations
  config.optimizeDeps = {
    include: ['react', 'react-dom']
  };
}

### Monitoring Deploy Health

I've added a deployment health check:

```bash
## Check if your build will succeed on CF Pages
bun run check:deploy

✅ Build size: 4.2MB (under 25MB limit)
✅ Functions size: 124KB (under 1MB limit)
✅ All environment variables present
✅ Headers file valid
✅ Redirects file valid

## The Impact

These improvements have transformed how I work with my blog:

**Before:**

- 5-10 minutes to create a new post
- Manual refreshing after every change
- Errors discovered at build time
- Searching through files manually
- Deploy anxiety (will it work in production?)

**After:**

- 30 seconds to create a new post
- Instant feedback on every save
- Errors caught immediately with helpful fixes
- Powerful search across all content
- Confident deployments with local preview
- Automated quality checks on every commit
- Spell checking and link validation
- Performance optimization alerts

## Implementation Details

All these tools leverage modern JavaScript tooling:

1. **Bun Runtime**: Fast execution and built-in TypeScript support
1. **Vite Plugin System**: Deep integration with the build process
1. **Chalk**: Beautiful terminal output with colors
1. **Sharp**: Lightning-fast image generation
1. **Wrangler**: Local Cloudflare Pages development
1. **Gray Matter**: Reliable YAML frontmatter parsing
1. **Markdownlint-cli2**: Consistent markdown formatting
1. **CSpell**: Intelligent spell checking with custom dictionaries
1. **Markdown-link-check**: Automated link validation
1. **Husky**: Git hooks for automated quality checks

The best part? These tools are tailored specifically for this blog's needs, not generic solutions that almost fit.

## Try It Yourself

Want to implement similar tools for your blog? Here's the approach:

1. **Start with the biggest pain point** - For us, it was post creation
1. **Build incrementally** - Each tool can be independent
1. **Focus on developer joy** - Make the happy path effortless
1. **Provide helpful errors** - When things go wrong, explain how to fix them
1. **Integrate deeply** - Use your build system's plugin architecture
1. **Match production locally** - Especially important with edge platforms

## 7. Automated Quality Assurance: Pre-commit Excellence

The latest addition to the DevEx toolkit is comprehensive pre-commit automation that catches issues before they reach production:

### Markdown Linting

```bash
## Automatic on commit, or manual check
bun run lint:md

Using `markdownlint-cli2`, the system now validates:

- Heading hierarchy and structure
- Consistent list formatting
- Proper code block syntax
- Blog-friendly rules (no strict line length limits)

### Spell Checking with Smart Dictionary

```bash
## Check spelling across all posts
bun run spell

The `cspell` integration includes:

- 100+ technical terms and proper names in custom dictionary
- Blog-specific terminology (DevEx, CLI tools, framework names)
- Context-aware suggestions for corrections
- Warnings rather than blocking (maintains flow)

### Link Validation

```bash
## Verify all links are working
bun run check:links

Background link checking with `markdown-link-check`:

- Detects broken external links
- Handles timeouts and retries gracefully
- Ignores localhost and email links appropriately
- Runs async to avoid blocking commits

### Image Optimization Alerts

The pre-commit hook now warns about:

- Images larger than 1MB (performance impact)
- Suggestions for optimization before committing
- Automated social media image regeneration

### Enhanced Security Scanning

Improved secret detection that:

- Avoids false positives on tool configurations
- Uses precise regex patterns for actual secrets
- Excludes lock files and configuration files
- Provides clear guidance when issues are found

All these checks run automatically on every commit, creating a safety net that maintains quality without breaking workflow.

## What's Next?

I'm not done yet. Future improvements include:

- **Content analytics**: Track which posts perform best
- **AI-assisted writing**: Integrated tools for content improvement
- **Automated SEO checks**: Beyond just description length
- **Deploy previews**: Automatic social media preview generation

## Conclusion

Developer experience isn't just about the code you write—it's about the entire workflow. By investing in custom tooling (built together with Claude), I've made blog writing a pleasure instead of a chore.

The key insight? Your content creation tools should work the way you think. When the tools get out of the way, you can focus on what matters: sharing your knowledge with the world.

*What developer experience improvements would make your blogging workflow better? I'd love to hear your ideas!*

---

*This post was written using the very tools it describes. From creation with `bun run new-post` to live preview with hot reload, every feature mentioned made writing this post smoother. That's the ultimate test of good developer experience: using your own tools and loving them.*

Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>