I think the ideal stack is one where you don't maintain the stack and instead use someone else's managed service. Otherwise it can turn into a huge distraction and a rabbit hole, keeping you from operating the blog itself.
The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
151–160 of 275 posts
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#152I would amend this blog post's title to be the following: "The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020 where the author is a React front end developer who loves TypeScript"
I went in thinking, "probably a static github io page, right?".
I said, out loud, at the first heading: "are you insane?"
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#153> 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'm not using "static" to imply "non-interactive", just that there shouldn't be a server that does any rendering/data loading.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#154Here's my stack: I write .html files in GNU Nano, and serve them with Apache. I've done that for about 20 years (with varying editors and servers), and I don't see why it needs to be any more complicated putting words on the internet. Yes yes, old man yells at cloud etc, but I'm a strong believer in "less is more".
That's what I do with my website[0] as well (just on nginx and with vim via SSH).
However, something that requires more functionality - syntax highlighting, tags, version control, easier deployments - I recently switched to Markdown + Hugo. [1]
I find it all to be very subjective. The above author clearly favors TypeScript and React, and for a personal blog, I see nothing wrong with slightly over-engineering it. His blog loads quickly, doesn't require an absurd number of network requests, and doesn't include any trackers. Fairly minimalist as far as the endproduct is concerned.
[0] https://chollinger.com/ [1] https://chollinger.com/blog/
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#155A lot of the comments here are reminding me a lot of Tom MacWright's critique of modern web development:
https://macwright.org/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html
Around the same time, Vladimir Agafonkin (perhaps in response to the above??) released tinyjam, https://github.com/mourner/tinyjam, which bills itself as "an elegant, zero-config static site generator in 100 lines of code, an experiment in radical simplicity."
Maybe the above two links will resonate here :)
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hugo is awesome! (Apart from the Go templates, before you get the hang of them..) A year or two back, shouting REACT at everything and everyone could actually land you a new job, but now... I'd just stick to Hugo and focus on my content if I wanted to impress any recruiters.
Hugo is great but check out Zola, it is basically like Hugo but with better templates IMO.
the built in image processing is kind of a big deal for Zola that's handy. a cut above all node based pipelines that have horrible native modules for that. I kinda just want to write Vue components for posts rather than markdown so turn between trying Zola it nuxts new content cms
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they're gonna be around for a long time how many months does that translate to in frontend dev time?
This meme is tedious. Typescript is here to stay. No question. React has been a thing now for what, six years? And it feels like 80% of FE job opening require React. And no major shift on the horizon.
When did you start web development? Serious question.
We went through all the ‘here to stay’ a few times over already.
Cordova, Bootstrap, Backbone, Coffeescript, Angular, Grunt, Gulp, Require.js/AMD, I think we already moved into and out of React Native lol, that whole Mongo thing, everyone had to be a D3 expert almost at one point, isomorphic apps almost became the thing - Meteor, they were all here to stay.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#158The tech stack for my personal blog is a It's really just a (bad) static site generator, it's just that every static site generator I've run into so far was way more complicated than I need and so it was faster to write my own with only the three features I want than to learn a big complicated tool.
I guess I have mixed feelings here. It makes sense to invest time in a complicated setup for a personal website as a hobby project, and I am quite clear that I am not a software person so that's just not something that really interests me as a way to spend my time. Spending a ton of time "developing a blog" feels to me like it's just a big roadblock in the way of actually, you know, blogging. I acknowledge that a good part of that is personal preference.
On the other hand... much of the post really concerns me. The author talks about React and TS like they're the only alternative to writing bare JS. Well, for one, there are other, simpler options even within the TS ecosystem. For another, the website doesn't really seem to have any behavior that requires JS, so I'm not sure why JS needs to be involved in the first place.
The rejection of using MD along with React seems like... a damning condemnation of React? Is it really that hard? People tolerate that?
The assertion that most CMSs require two round-trips to deliver the content speaks of someone who has not really seen the world outside of modern JS front-end... It would be very uncommon for a CMS in another language to require more than one round-trip, as the content is prepared server-side before delivery of any kind of front-end.
I guess, if I am to be opinionated (which I certainly will be), my feeling is that the author should have spent their hobby time exploring the world outside of React rather than hammering what seems like a rather round peg into a rather square hole, and then presenting it as "ideal."
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#159I would amend this blog post's title to be the following: "The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020 where the author is a React front end developer who loves TypeScript"
That page of just text is a 1Mb download... Is this what the web has become now? Do we really need 1Mb of boilerplate for 10Kb of text?
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
It becomes more complicated as soon as a you have a sidebar with "Last articles" in which case you would need to edit each single HTML files to edit the sidebar consistently. Even with a single archives page you need to think about updating the archive for each new article. Also Markdown is definitely more author-friendly than HTML, but that's more like an extra.
cat header > index.html cat page >> index.html cat footer >> index.html
cat header page footer > index.html