You find yourself needing to create a website, but you quickly start to hate the web world.
You see shadcn everywhere and you are sick of it. You see dozens of JS frameworks on top of JS frameworks. Why can’t they just make up their minds? Why are they chasing trends? Look at all this hype.
You look for No JS, No Build, good old PHP, and find a minimal template, it’s just 1kB of CSS! You fork it, change the colors, and slap your profile picture at the top.
And that’s where I come in, and see this:
Well, you just img src’d a 2MB image, with 5Mbps your site took 4s to load, and if you deployed it on GitHub Pages, it will only be cached for 10 minutes. I opened your site on the train, you should be paying for my mobile network this month.
This is one end of the spectrum, here is the other end:
Your company needs a documentation site, and you decide to go with what works because you don’t have time. You choose a docs framework that uses Nextjs, RSCs and deploy it on Vercel.
And I see this for a page that’s just a sidebar and barely has any content:
That is 1.8MB of JS which is at least cached, but then there is 1.1MB of RSC payload JSON, and these are not cached for some unbeknownst reason. 1.1MB on every page load. For a static site. Congrats, you also have a 1 second INP.
I check every site I visit with WebPageTest, and I will find yours.
Good news is that it’s not impossible to understand the web world, it’s a skill issue.
Pages should load instantly, even if it’s a web app, and especially if it’s static,
but you don’t have to work with 10 year old tech for that
Believe it or not, there are people who know what they are doing. So don’t settle for stagnation, look for better tools and master them. Most of the time they’re better in every way: smaller, faster, and usually also have the superior DX.
The JS ecosystem is massive, TypeScript and Javascript combined usage is 2x of Python on GitHub. I find it funny that people get overwhelmed by 20+ frameworks. You just need to look at them all, the best ones are usually easy to spot. No one is forcing you to use all of them.
And if a new and better tool comes out, you can just… learn that too. There are no trends, there are only better or worse tools, making one your identity is not a good idea.
From Paul Graham:
If you think of technology as something that’s spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents an interesting problem. Get yourself to the leading edge of some technology.
The web world is full of unsolved problems, we need and will have better tools.