I love the website. Just last weekend I made a reader for my company's forum with absolutely no CSS. It's just plain text and a total of 38 lines of code written by me, which includes db connection parameters. Some people I showed it to wanted it to be the real forum. It was fast as hell and mobile and tty (lynx) friendly but didn't allow any sort of login, posting, or posts read tracking, so not really usable. Fun though. I love super basic things. Another really basic site I use is called Hacker News. Heard of it? :)
I encourage people as much as I can to consider doing sites to use as little resources as needed.
Shameless plug, I recently put up the Leanternet directory of lean internet sites, you might like to see more of these kind of sites and the Leanternet principles at https://www.leanternet.com
I like the idea in principle, though in practice i noticed that there are a bunch of similar lists and all of them tend to have only 6-7 sites (half of them being the same).
I think there needs to be a more automated way of finding and sharing these sites, perhaps some browser extension?
Indeed, which is why I have also focused towards setting some principles which would hopefully guide others into understanding and applying the mindset.
oh i did the same thing years ago when I was working at HostGator except I wrote an ncurses front-end to their live chat support system. granted i was the only person who used it (and it was an extension of a toy project i made that essentially had bots with random names connect and send garbage to see if that would propagate out to support chat and see how many people would notice). but either way it's always fun to build a minimalist interface to things (especially when you don't have the code directly for them and have to reverse engineer stuff!)
I'm probably going to take a lot of heat from all the young whippersnappers out there for this, but I absolutely love your comment about React. I'm going to save it. It totally describes my experiences with other developers. They want to use React to re-write major portions of our codebase that work perfectly well as is, just because React is super awesome! Can you guess how many of our customers have complained that our website isn't a single page application? I'll give you a hint, it's less than one. The devs will also make little teeny projects that would take less than an hour to write in Vanilla JS and make this big 20 hour development project that has a monolithic codebase that all the sudden needs routers and back button integration and url mangling and gigantic switch statements to draw the correct "page." Oh and don't forget you have to set up all that webpack and and compiling routines so that you can compile all that garbage into other garbage. And then you also have to do that build over and over again for every change. This is JavaScript. Script is in the name. It's not meant to be a compiled language. And contrary to our dev's beliefs, React does not run or draw faster than Vanilla JS, unless you are constantly redrawing the whole page in Vanilla JS, which no one does. I hate React.
Well I have 100s (literally because I work a lot with incubated startups) of anecdotes like that; when something is not react but makes bucket loads of money anyway (pro tip; those two things are absolutely not related at all), there will be someone who suggests a rewrite in React (native) for a reason that makes no sense to anyone but the people who are starry-eyed looking at their heros on Youtube giving low-tech presentations but with such an air of superiority. Well they DO work at Facebook (wait was that not some immoral company? Wait, wasn't the first version written in PHP which we all (...) hate here by the robot CEO everybody thinks is slightly insane these days? I guess that doesn't affect the tech now so let's ignore)!
Edit: I did not mean the last part sarcastic although it reads like that; I think Zuckerberg is a vastly overrated twat but that or that the product of the company currently sucks (yes yes IMHO, but many people agree and I mean currently; it could be great, but shareholder value) does not have anything todo with technical merit.
In the United States the management layer doesn't have a clue so if you don't keep up on React, GraphQL, etc etc - you're seen as a curmudgeon.
They're not the ones learning it but they're still attending all of the conferences for it and with a non-practiced engineering capability they're back to cargo cult BS.
Best to keep learning the new hotness or it's career suicide. Just remember, for almost any 9-5 it's about the _narrative_ of work more than it is about the work. Rewriting/changing huge portions of your already-working tech stack is job security. I truly believe a huge portion of engineers engage in their own "make-work" to justify their existence/paycheck.
I admit it, I hate single page apps. I see very few that actually work well. I don't hate JavaScript, it has its place, but you don't need to make an entire website an SPA. Stuff like the main Spotify, Slack, or Discord pages, and even things like Google Docs, and email front ends are fine for SPA. But you don't need to also embed all the FAQs and other crap into the SPA. You know what isn't an SPA? Hacker News. You know what else isn't? Google, GitHub, Amazon, and Stack Overflow. I've disabled the SPA version of Reddit. I've built SPAs and they are so much harder and take so much longer to develop and maintain than traditional web sites. I wish they'd just die. Sadly, everyone else at my work orgasms about SPAs, pushing every damn thing into it. We have stuff that works perfectly well and no one has ever complained about it? Screw it, let's spend $50k turning that feature into an SPA. I know many of you disagree with me and I'll get off my soap box now. </vent>
