About This Site

TL;DR

This is an opportunity to create something simple for a change, at least for the therapeutic aspect of it. Some nostalgia going on here too. Maybe I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to my complaints about the framework madness in the Front-End development space.

What you're looking at is built on plain old ExpressJS with a PostgreSQL DB and Ye Olde Nunjucks templates 👴🏻. I built a hyper-simple CMS to create blog posts for the homepage. After years of JavaScript framework fatigue, dealing with Angular and React/NextJS Front-Ends, I began to desire the experience of creating somehing with the absolute minimum code and hoops to jump through. Call it therapy, if you will.

The Node backend responds with HTML, can you say SSR? 😂 The HTML uses semantic tags and native browser functionality where appropriate. I just wrote CSS 😱. For most of the pages, there is no justification for the, now common, JavaScript bloat of multiple megabytes just to render static content.

On this little project, the idea is to fetch assets and run scripts only when required by the page. I will just throw new ideas on here when they arise and I have the free time and not be necessarily fastidious, so heads up 😉

As I encounter anti-patterns and workarounds in what I have done, I expect I will begin to search for ways to replicate from scratch, in minimal code, some of the desirable features of the large frameworks. That should be a good exercise.