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The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

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Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#81

Post by tbran »

The most important thing to me when building a blog or info type site is how hard it will be to maintain or change in a year or more.

I have one site running on Wagtail (Django) for the past 3 or 4 years, and two other sites currently built with Hugo (LotsOfOpps[0] and BuiltRigs[1]). I've put together lots of other sites with Hugo, Wordpress, and other Django CMSes.

The Wagtail site is definitely overengineered, and I usually dread making updates to the code a few years on.

I've messed around with other generators like 11ty[2] and Gridsome[3] (both pretty cool projects!), but I mostly keep coming back to Hugo. It's pretty simple, and so far I haven't had to worry about a 3rd-party package breaking stuff.

[0] https://www.lotsofopps.com [1] https://www.builtrigs.com [2] https://gridsome.org/ [3] https://www.11ty.dev/

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#83

Post by jaredcwhite »

"I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times"

Don't mean to pick on the author, but these sorts of comments scare the shit out of me. React is fine for what it was originally billed as (a library for building UI components), but the way people use it to take over the entire web stack is bananas. Definitely not needed for a static blog, LOL.

P.S. Use LitElement anyway, not React. The future is Web Components.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#84

Post by dpbriggs »

Another aspect is that your blog should make you want to blog.

The tech stack therefore mirrors your interests.

It feels great to use tools built by _yourself_ for _yourself_. Doubly so if the stack is janky (rust / org-mode for me).

The feeling that you've made something makes you want to invest more into it. To make sure the tools were worth making in the first place.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#85

Post by siralonso »

Lots of negativity here, but I think if your goal is to be able to sprinkle in bits of interactivity (or demos) among mostly static content, this is a great choice. Yes, it has more dependencies than some other solutions - but the goal isn’t to be zero-dependency - it’s to remove as much friction from your publishing process as possible while still providing the required capability.

If you want to intermix markdown and react, check out MDX. You can write a file that’s 99% vanilla markdown, and just drop in a react component at the appropriate point.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#86

Post by joekrill »

woutr_be wrote: post #71
jcpst wrote: post #11

I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous for a static site. React and Typescript with embedded markdown? This problem has been solved a thousand times over with much simpler tooling. > I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times. :(

> I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times. This is honestly quite a disturbing trend with a lot of front-end developers these days. I recently asked a front-end dev why they chose React for a simple app over simple server-side templating, he's reaction was "we don't need SEO, so why do we need React SSR", like how does that argument even make sense. They seem to have forgotte…

> I recently asked a front-end dev why they chose React for a simple app over simple server-side templating

I don't really get this argument. What makes "simple server-side templating" better than React components? I'd argue that these React components effectively are templates. If someone is proficient in React, why are we suggesting they have to learn some other random templating language? Not to mention deal with additional things like file organization, transpiling, etc.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#88

Post by jaredcwhite »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #50
jcpst wrote: post #11

I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous for a static site. React and Typescript with embedded markdown? This problem has been solved a thousand times over with much simpler tooling. > I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times. :(

We've been using Gatsby for a blog. Writing the layout in React gives us backend devs experience with it whilst staying relatively simple. Markdown then gives us a nice way to write content and separates layout and presentation from that content. Gatsby has loads of plugins and examples so getting started is easy. There's a plugin for an RSS feed. I'm completely with you that a blog can be HTML and CSS, but I can clo…

You don't need Gatsby for any of those things you want to do. You can accomplish the same goal with a much simpler toolkit, like Eleventy. Or my favorite, Bridgetown, for the Rubyists out there.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#89

Post by learnstats2 »

jasode wrote: post #25
clarry wrote: post #3

> I worry that many developers (maybe even you, dear reader) are settling for suboptimal, restrictive static-site generators that place limits on the interactivity and flexibility of your website. I wonder what sort of interactivity you want on your text? > This degrades page load speeds and user experience, which accordingly degrades your rankings on Google. Instead I want every page of my site to be pre-rendered to…

>I wonder what sort of interactivity you want on your text? In case you glossed over it, I think he said it in his post: "But down the road, I may want to build a page that contains an interactive visualization, a filterable table, or a demo of a React component I'm open-sourcing."

I feel the YAGNI is strong in this one.
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