Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

jwn.gr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 91 posts

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#51

Post by skeeter2020 »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #47
com2kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of , because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including ". In this case, is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration…

we used it for a highly interactive scheduler UI in a commercial software project. The appeal was do Flash development with .Net developers.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#52

Post by mirchiseth »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #47
com2kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of , because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including ". In this case, is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration…

SAP used it for their CRM when they moved from desktop client to browser based clients.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#53

Post by jama_ »

Fully concur with the points you made. I also just finished transitioning my personal website to Astro from an Eleventy setup that I got too lazy to maintain. I made a couple of landing pages for clients and my own projects with Astro and the maintenance experience was eye-opening.

Astro really is quite wondrous. If you don't stray too far from its opinionated route, it's almost magical. But some more advanced things do still take some tinkering. My sitemap and RSS with full text setups I wouldn't describe as the most elegant things in existence, but they do their job.

What I'm still lacking/wondering about is whether there's a CDN static site/serverless hosting provider like Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare, but that isn't free or $20/mo. I'd like to pay for a good service that obviously has running costs, but I don't believe there's quite something like those.

Anyway, I like the website. It's easy on the eyes.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#54

Post by com2kid »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #47
com2kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of , because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including ". In this case, is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration…

Silverlight's real usage was rapid internal corporate app development. Internal tools basically. It is hard to describe exactly how absurdly popular Silverlight was at the time within corporations.

Microsoft had a big internal political battle and did the stupidest thing possible and abandoned Silveright, which pissed off a LOT of companies, who then started building internal web apps instead. This lead to a slow migration off of Microsoft's technology stack within companies, and now basically Office is what is left.

For younger developers, it is hard to describe what life was like before.

So you'd go to work, and there was a custom C#, or possibly Visual Basic, time tracking app you logged into. Internal corporate web pages were written in ASP, or ASPX. Lots of internal databases were running on SQL server or just MS Access, and you directly talked to them through custom apps running on your machine.

Because the C#/VB development experience was so good, this was honestly easier than writing a website is now. Because apps only had to run on one platform (Windows) and mobile didn't exist yet, making UIs was easy-peasy. Microsoft made a ton of inroads into corporate because Bob from Accounting figured out he could setup a database running off of a local file share (MS Access) and write a simple GUI to keep track of vacation usage using some books he found in his local library, or maybe he even got ahold of some old MSDN CDs, which literally had higher quality documentation and examples than anything made in the last 15 years or so.

Silverlight was a continuation of that linage, super easy to write UIs in, super fast to develop. You could data bind a form to a backend database in a few minutes. You'd get full accessibility, hotkeys, everything, faster than you can debug a single CSS issue.

From what I understand (I was a very low level employee when it all went down) the OS org got pissed that the developer org was basically making the dominant UI framework, ripped it away from them and rewrote it as WinRT. Short of it is, Microsoft ended up losing mobile, they lost the trust of corporations, and they lost the trust of developers. After Silverlight died there aren't really anymore "Windows developers" as a career field. Everything moved to websites.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#55

Post by jwngr »

jama_ wrote: post #53

Fully concur with the points you made. I also just finished transitioning my personal website to Astro from an Eleventy setup that I got too lazy to maintain. I made a couple of landing pages for clients and my own projects with Astro and the maintenance experience was eye-opening. Astro really is quite wondrous. If you don't stray too far from its opinionated route, it's almost magical. But some more advanced things…

Thanks for sharing! I use Fireabse Hosting, which I guess gets grouped in with the other services you mentioned. It's free, has a lightweight devX, and integrates with CI via GitHub actions for preview and production builds [1].

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/jwn.gr/tree/master/.github/workflow...

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#56

Post by madeofpalk »

swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

Is Vercel a frontend tooling startup?

I've always seen them as a AWS-wrapping hosting company, who funds some react projects on the side and will drop them at a moment's notice.

Netlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#57

Post by madeofpalk »

soufianee wrote: post #46
mmckelvy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is on Remix (which will eventually just be React Router). I think it's just the right amount of abstraction over native web functionality with a nice, simple API that doesn't deviate too much from web standards. I also think the full stack approach just makes sense for developing on the web.

Remix is backed by Shopify, compared to Next.js being backed by Vercel. Does this influence any decision to take? Today Next.js has a big advantage which is that they have already integrated most of the new React 19 rendering features and apis. I think it will take a while for Remix to catch up to that. Other notable frameworks are community led Waku made by Daishi Kato from Pmdrs and TanStart made by Tanner from Tan…

> Remix is backed by Shopify

This makes me distrust it (slightly more than I distrust Next/Vercel).

Shopify's core business is not in making javascript frameworks. Remix is always one bad Shopify away from being ejected.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#59

Post by yen223 »

com2kid wrote: post #38
swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

I lived through the times when you had to pay lots of money for software tooling. As a kid from a third-world country, I don't share the same rosy sentiment towards those times.

It's too easy to take for granted, but modern-day free open-source tooling is a godsend for a lot of folks out there.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#60

Post by jama_ »

jwngr wrote: post #55
jama_ wrote: post #53

Fully concur with the points you made. I also just finished transitioning my personal website to Astro from an Eleventy setup that I got too lazy to maintain. I made a couple of landing pages for clients and my own projects with Astro and the maintenance experience was eye-opening. Astro really is quite wondrous. If you don't stray too far from its opinionated route, it's almost magical. But some more advanced things…

Thanks for sharing! I use Fireabse Hosting, which I guess gets grouped in with the other services you mentioned. It's free, has a lightweight devX, and integrates with CI via GitHub actions for preview and production builds [1]. [1] https://github.com/jwngr/jwn.gr/tree/master/.github/workflow...

Right, I didn't consider Google. The 360MB/day of free egress traffic (Spark plan) strike me as very peculiar. But at least it isn't Cloudflare's "unlimited" with secret limits in place, or Netlify's 100GB/month and then enormous costs on everything above.

Thanks for reminding me! I'll give Firebase a look.

By the way, very minor thing I noticed. Clicking on your photo on the homepage swaps backgrounds, but the timer-based swapping still runs on its fixed interval. Can look unpolished if you click it a bunch or in the wrong moment.

Post reply on HN