Simplicity 08/13/22

In hindsight, none of the points I made in the note about the Web Frontend Stack made actual sense to me. I now know that there is an arsenal of tools that are available to perform relatively simple and complicated tasks alike is astonishingly great, battle-tested, and well-documented. You just have to find the ones that stand the test of time.

This has been proven numerous times; based.cooking is a more recent example of a fast and straight-up no-bullshit cooking site made by Luke Smith.

Attempting to pre-optimize problems of scale before you even reach them is always a bad idea. Putting constraints and attempting to think of the most efficient, extensible solution results in a wonderfully, clear and simple idea.

This notion is the driving force behind every decision I now make.

As a straight answer for the conundrum, here is the conclusion I reached: One should use plain HTML, CSS and JS to achieve your goals. Use battle-tested methodologies and practices and ignore promises of "ease of use" or "extensible frameworks and CLI utilities" of new opinionated tools and technologies. Adhere to standards and pave the cow paths instead of creating your own (bad) implementations. Prefer good, well-documented software APIs over black-boxes or "all-in-one" super CLI tools. Prefer succinct, clear code over deceivingly terse framework-specific wizardry.

If an idea isn't simple, it will not be clear, and therefore almost certainly wrong.