you'll have to excuse the incendiary nature of this post, as it was made with malice and anger in my heart.

the web is a fascinating piece of technology for me. an accessible universal platform for apps, viewable on anything from phone to laptop to desktop to game console, rife with documentation so that anyone who wants to put a website up can. i know some people aren't fond that the web browser has kind of become the one thing that computers actually Do now, and i have my concerns too. but, for the most part, i think it is a useful technology to have around.

so why the hell is every modern framework a clusterfuck of boilerplate that takes weeks to understand top to bottom?

for years the most complicated thing you ever had to setup was like, https. and to be fair, that has actually gotten easier. nowadays you punch in certbot once and it works forever. but if you wanna start a new web project in like, react:

• install node
• install npm
• run npx to init your project
• npx goes "hey man are you chill with downloading this random boilerplate generator that will download more things", say yes
• npx installs the package, the package starts up, asks you 10 different onboarding questions that determines what of the 300 dependencies aren't optional
• run npm run serve or whatever and a web server magically boots up and now you have a placeholder page

okay cool. i spend 30 minutes trying to navigate the framework, try to learn through online documentation because the templating engine has gone through 3 different iterations, eventually find out the newest version uses a thing called JSX that is kind of like html if it sucked a little bit more. i build my website, navigating through the complicated ordeal of figuring out routing (requires another dependency) and feel the entire thing was largely bogged down by the process. i get it. i understand why state as a source of truth for layout is good. but the way this has become the default way of building websites feels incredibly detrimental.

so, whatever. i'm not building a reactive responsive phone app for my investors. i'm building a blog. i want a blog. i want to generate a static site. fortunately, "static site generators" are a thing that exist! cool. i begin my search. hugo! hugo looks good. hugo looks like exactly what i want actually. so i dig into the docs and oh my lord why is it like that ????

admittedly, i did very little fishing through hugo. the reason was largely that i know html, css and javascript. i guess i technically know scss through immersion, and i know a bit of modern framework-y things like react but more preferably svelte. when i looked up "hugo custom css" i was taken to a documentation detailing themes. there's a cli command to add a theme, but from there i didn't really find much official documentation. everything was third parties, roughly conveying what you need to do to make a new theme, but never actually showing me what that looked like in thorough detail and worse, the entire tutorial was a multi page ordeal. to ultimately come away with some html and css, that i could just, write myself. most of the recommendations i saw online said find a configurable template instead of doing the work of writing the css yourself.

so i tossed the idea of using hugo and hopped on github. and wouldn't you know it there was a beautiful project called makesite.py that is 130 lines of gods own python that takes some html and css and sticks the entire thing together. i got the entire thing running with ci on github pages in a day. and the beautiful thing is, i understand it. i know how it works. the entire inner workings of my website are intuitive to understand and i was able to figure it out all in my spare time following a workday.

i can't say that about my svelte portfolio, which i ultimately did like making but whose project folder with dependencies is nearly 100mib...

nail in the coffin: this blog totals 1.3mib. about 95% of that is the background image.