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Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

clairefro.dev

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Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#31

Post by Capricorn2481 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #21
eropple wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A convoluted SPA" is fully orthogonal to React. If you're making a blog into a SPA, that's a you problem. It's been possible (and recommended for many things!) to just bake a static website with React and use JSX as a templating language for a long time.

Why would you need JSX for a static website? If you need JS then it's not "static".

Obviously there's a spectrum. A static website just means the files are served statically from a folder, and routing is just the folder path. You can still serve JS files and have a static website. If you put an alert on a button, you're not suddenly a SPA

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#32

Post by yitianjian »

eropple wrote: post #18
quest88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop it. You know what they mean.

"What they mean" isn't correct or reasonable and is largely part of the same grumbling groupthink that willfully refuses to come to grips with the realities of the tools they've decided they don't like. React is not large, is of moderate complexity (most of the complexity of "a React app" lives well outside of React itself), and can be stripped down to a fully static templating language without much effort. As I've l…

My hot take: there's a general feeling of looking down on "web devs" or UI/front-end stuff. It's not really necessary to have React for a portfolio site, but it's not really an issue if they do.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#34

Post by willsmith72 »

I don't get the value prop of all vanilla. The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have. Sure CRA was slow, but vite makes things sub-second again.

It's like when remix people talk about progressive enhancement to me. Sure, cool, you can do things differently. But why? If you already know the ins and outs of a framework or tool and are productive with it, use it. I'm never gonna hire someone because of how much they "flexed" with their vanilla site, just like I won't hire someone who flexed with their cool fresh-from-bootcamp react animations.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#36

Post by embit »

city41 wrote: post #23

My website is also completely static, but made with React. That means no React at all at runtime, it is completely static. React does not automatically mean dynamic. I get all the benefits of both. I love the flexibility nextjs provides here.

Yes this is correct. It’s perfectly possible to build purely static website by react and nextjs

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#37

Post by syx »

carlossouza wrote: post #17

> I became a dev when everyone was hiring for React, so React is what I taught myself immediately after bootcamp in the scramble for a job A better education path (in a bootcamp, university, book, youtube, whatever) would start with the fundamentals and build it from the ground up... not the other way around. (I just realized how lucky I am for being taught in the best possible order, from the ground up... first the…

I think most of this comes down to the fact that these bootcamps are there to freshly bake people to work on the latest shiny tech completely ignoring the basics of computer science. I, like yourself, was very lucky to attend a university course that gave me exactly those fundamentals.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#38

Post by beej71 »

JohnFen wrote: post #9

I think this is a pretty awesome statement. I'm always unreasonably pleased when I see a web page that embraces appropriate simplicity. > Coding a basic vanilla multi-page application (MPA) saves time in development (goodbye babel/postcss/SSR config) and builds are fast (this site builds in less than 1.2 seconds). I'd hope that builds would be on the order of a small pile of milliseconds! (or zero: a site like that c…

> why not do that server-side? Or bake it into the html and set up a bit of automation to replace the year with a new one every Jan 1.

In this case I think I'd argue that the JS solution is the most simple to implement+maintain.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#39

Post by post-it »

arrowsmith wrote: post #21
eropple wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A convoluted SPA" is fully orthogonal to React. If you're making a blog into a SPA, that's a you problem. It's been possible (and recommended for many things!) to just bake a static website with React and use JSX as a templating language for a long time.

Why would you need JSX for a static website? If you need JS then it's not "static".

Generally, a static website refers to any website where the server just serves files rather than running application code for each request. JS runs on the client.

For example, I've been working on a character generator for the Inquisitor tabletop game. It's completely static because I just SFTP the build output to my webserver, but it uses React and JSX.

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