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The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

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161–170 of 275 posts

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

#161
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is it really? You might as well say it's been a disturbing trend that developers aren't familiar with assembly language anymore. As abstraction on top of abstraction is created, it becomes easier and easier to write software, so naturally there are now more frontend devs who aren't familiar with web dev basics. And if all you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. Similar trends happen for backend dev…

> it's been a disturbing trend that developers aren't familiar with assembly language anymore.

That is a disturbing trend.

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

#162
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wonder if he actually tried embedding HTML into Markdown, because that's as simple and straightforward as it can be: just start writing HTML in the Markdown document, and after the closing element, continue with the markdown text. This should completely cover the requirement to embed interactive elements into markdown using a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll without having to deal with an overly complex de…

I did, but I wasn't satisfied with that option.

I'd like the ability to embed arbitrary React+JSX into my Markdown, something which can theoretically be done (i.e. with the Hugo Babel plugin). But then I immediately realized I would have issues with importing my styling libraries (I used a custom-built Tailwind-esque set of emotion[0] classes) and using React Hooks.

As you can probably tell I have a hard time letting go of the power/flexibility of the React/SPA approach since it's all I've used for several years now.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary advantage of markdown is that it is more readable in plaintext.

Yeah, but you lose lots of HTML features—not even layout-related things, which of course aren't present in Markdown, but things like image captions, , , and so on. I love it for cases in which plain text would otherwise be used but it's lacking a lot of really nice features in HTML that aid readability and accessibility.

Any HTML is valid inside of Markdown, so you just write Markdown and then add HTML when it makes sense.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think TypeScript is about as standard for Javascript as it's going to get, I feel. I can't imagine writing Javascript without it anymore. But then again it took TypeScript coming along that made writing JavaScript something tolerable outside of having to use it for work.

I don't think there's going to be any new typing system that's 5% better that everyone is going to shift to just because it's the new hotness anymore. Or at least I hope not. TypeScript is good enough, let's just stick with it for the foreseeable future if you want to write type-safe Javascript, please.

I'm still using Angular at work, and I rather like it. If I needed to make an SPA outside of work I'd probably use it over React at this point. But that's a web framework, and those seem to come and go with the wind.

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

#165
post #5

Personally I work in tech all day, I want my blog to be as simple as possible and to focus just on my writing. Still using Jekyll.

One of my goals is to maintain that same authoring simplicity. All I need to do is create a new `.md` file in the right directory and a new blog post is created - just like you. I just don't want to fight an uphill battle every time I want to leave that lane.

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

#166
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I wrote my personal website [1] a few days ago (after it was blank for years) and went for concrete css [2] and plain HTML together with some Go code to serve the files. I set up a server on Hetzner Cloud [3] and my site was up within minutes using Traefik to get a SSL certificate from Letsencrypt. All in all it took me about 2 hours. If you start to play around with a CMS it can take you days if not weeks. Jus…

I heard in a jazz bar that you can host static sites for free at Zeit and use plain css for grid now, but I am unable to verify the rumours as my work limits Internet only to hackernews

> my work limits Internet only to hackernews

A workplace of dreams. What else do you need anyway?

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think TypeScript is about as standard for Javascript as it's going to get, I feel. I can't imagine writing Javascript without it anymore. But then again it took TypeScript coming along that made writing JavaScript something tolerable outside of having to use it for work. I don't think there's going to be any new typing system that's 5% better that everyone is going to shift to just because it's the new hotness anym…

Well, if it’s that standard it could be put into the ES spec, and if that ever happens, Babel will deprecate Typescript. That’s all it would take before Typescript will become another relic.

I am not opposed to Typescript, but I am trying to show that we’ve been here before many times.

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

#168
post #20
post #5

Personally I work in tech all day, I want my blog to be as simple as possible and to focus just on my writing. Still using Jekyll.

I use Jekyll too. It just works and I'd happily use it on future projects. Even with ~300 posts and ~100 drafts it only takes 2 seconds to see auto-reloaded updates when I'm actively writing. That's within WSL 1 too (room for speed improvements are there with WSL 2). It also has nice plugins to process SCSS and bundle your CSS / JS, along with md5 tagging all static files for cache busting without having to use Webpa…

You lost me at "plugins" I'm afraid. I looked into ways to mix in React + TypeScript into both Hugo and Jekyll and it just seemed like an uphill battle. Based on my criteria (which I'm realizing aren't very popular on HN!) the best approach is to build everything "React-first" with Markdown mixed in, instead of the other way around.

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

#169
Apart from the questionable complexity of the tech-stack, it's not even performant. According to WebBloatScore¹, the bloat score is 2.21. The webpage size is 491kb, makes 18 requests. In comparison, HN frontpage score is 0.175.

[1] https://www.webbloatscore.com/

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, using similar workflow for my blog, emacs export + some post-processing [0]. Even with high quality parsing libraries, when you dip into the most advanced features of org-mode (like literate programming via babel), you end up needing emacs anyway. And it's much more pleasant to tweak existing export code, than figuring out how to reimplement it from scratch. [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p/blob/master…

I checked out your articles and I like your writing style! I thought about doing batch export but ended up being too lazy to integrate it in my release flow. My compromise is to use this snippet: (defun make-blogging-mode () (interactive) (toggle-word-wrap) (toggle-truncate-lines) (flycheck-mode) (flycheck-vale-toggle-enabled) (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'org-mode-export-hook) ) And this find-file hook in my blog temp…

Thanks! :) There is also 'org-export-in-background' which can export asynchronously! https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Export-Dispatcher.html
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