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

clairefro.dev

11–20 of 192 posts

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

#11

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point? Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

[flagged]

This happens rare enough that a news event may be warranted though.

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

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

React isn’t complicated. It’s not even considered a framework, it’s better described as a library! It’s a great way to templatize your code. Is it the only way? No. Do you even need to templatize your code? No.

Stop it. You know what they mean.

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

#14

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point? Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

> Is this news at this point?

If you started your career in the last 5-10 years then yes, it might be news.

An entire generation of web developers has been trained to think that every app big and small needs to be a convoluted SPA. The results are a disaster.

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

#15

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point? Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

> Is this news at this point? If you started your career in the last 5-10 years then yes, it might be news. An entire generation of web developers has been trained to think that every app big and small needs to be a convoluted SPA. The results are a disaster.

"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.

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

#16
post #4

The reason react was developed is mostly null at this point. Modern javascript is so fast and plesant it's hard to imagine many real reasons you can't stay entirely within vanilla.

React wasn’t created because JS is slow, but rather to streamline and speed up DOM operations.

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

#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 basics... and how so many people didn't have this opportunity)

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

#18
post #12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React isn’t complicated. It’s not even considered a framework, it’s better described as a library! It’s a great way to templatize your code. Is it the only way? No. Do you even need to templatize your code? No.

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 linked elsewhere, I turned React into an email templating engine once because I don't like Handlebars; rendering JSX as static, no-JS HTML is a one-liner when you throw it a React component.

Using React for a static website is totally fine.

So is not using it.

Being weird about it is not fine.

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

#19

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point? Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

[flagged]

I'm baffled by how how many web developers have the attitude of "React projects are too complex, let's put another layer of abstraction on top of React to simplify things". Of course, usually for things that should never have been React to begin with. Anyway, good for that guy that he discovered Vanilla HTML and CSS late in his career, but I also don't see how this is front page worthy.

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

#20
post #3

Can I write a React app and recompile it as a vanilla? For example to take all involved parts of the library and not take the rest.

That doesn't really parse. React as a thing is some pretty thin DOM manipulation and some helper stuff. Are you thinking of something like Next or some all-in React+Redux stack?
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