Why reinvent the wheel? Use Wordpress/Ghost etc
I recommend reading through some of my criteria (ability to use npm modules, TypeScript React components, etc). May be possible with Wordpress (haven't tried it) but sounds like an uphill battle.
The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
181–190 of 275 posts
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#182This setup is going to lose its sheen really quickly when every attempt at writing a blog post also accompanies three hours of npm package bumps
All my dependency versions are pinned, and I'm not using any global CLIs that may change under me. Valid concern though if you don't take precautions.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#183Apart 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/
Wow. This site pointed out something that should've been obvious. I had an uncompressed image uploaded.
I'm still bloated, but performance is a lot better. Thanks for the link!
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#184Maybe I'm getting "too old for the shit" but, why is he using all that latest "web app" tech to build a series of web pages?
It's all I've ever known.
More concretely: I try to address that in my list of criteria section under "React + TypeScript". I couldn't shake the feeling that doing anything complex in the future was going to be even more complicated if I have to fight against an SSG framework to do it. I also address the fact that currently this is wildly overengineered currently :D
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#185React isn’t a good tool for a blog.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#186Scans to see how he is dealing with native comments... Realises the issue remains unsolved, along with 99% of ’CMS’ solutions... Continues with Wordpress.
What do you mean exactly? Are you referring to adding a comments section to my blog? I didn't even consider doing that, but if you want that then Wordpress makes a lot of sense.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#187Earning my daily bread with writing React with TypeScript and using next.js, this is exactly what I would use for my personal blog. Sorry for the many negative comments. I'm not sure if many people here do websites for a living, but I can't imagine doing stuff any other way anymore. It's just so convinient from a developer standpoint. Is it overkill for some websites? Maybe, but in the end you are dead on with your s…
Thanks John! Not discouraged (or surprised) by the reaction. I think using the word "ideal" in the title was a fatal mistake - lesson learned :)
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> You lost me at "plugins" I'm afraid.
Plugins are optional. If you used Webpack directly to manage your static files you could just tell Jekyll to load them from whatever directory Webpack outputs them to and then you can build your SPA to render blog posts however you see fit.
If you're using React you would want to use a native Webpack config right? This way it works anywhere, and isn't tied into any specific static site generator.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#189Apart 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/
That's a pretty cool tool! The most bloated site I managed to find was Facebook's login page at ~77.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#190This is front end only so not really a complete stack.
True. I briefly mentioned Headless CMSs but didn't really give them the time of day. I didn't want to do anything that required a server/db/CMS, but I didn't do a good job of justifying that decision.
I do think the term "tech stack" has come to be used more broadly than your definition.