Show HN: A lightning fast personal website built with Next.js(jdnordstrom.com) |
Show HN: A lightning fast personal website built with Next.js(jdnordstrom.com) |
But amidst all this craziness, the last thing I wanted to avoid distraction. I needed a project to continue growing as an engineer and doing what I love--coding.
I recently spoke with a friend from undergrad, Jared Gorski. We talked about web development, his work at Liferay, my work on Nautilus (a dev tool that visualizes Docker Compose instances). He also started sharing with my how he recently updated his website to improve speed. After our conversation, I checked it out and was inspired. I had already been thinking about SSR (server side rendering) and how to leverage it. Thus, the mission to build this website was born.
I would love any feedback from the Hack News community on the site. Thanks!
DRY, modular, etc. are not blanket principles that one must honor at all cost, in every circumstance. They are ways to simplify and organize complex code bases. Not making the code base complex in the first place takes first place, though.
Brian Kernighan wrote "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." The best way to control complexity is to eliminate it, and not introduce it in the first place.
And it allows me to dynamically "fetch" my writings as I add more. I don't have to create a whole new html file. I simply write a markdown file, add it into the repo on github (I use slackedit which syncs directly to the github repo), then the website gets rebuilt with HTML, and then deployed.
Making the code base more maintainable and better suited for my purposes.
On the other hand, I do agree with you. React is a bit heavy weight for a static website. Next.js still ships the whole react bundle in production. So, while time to first paint is the same speed as a simple html, js site, the time to interaction is much slower and the network load higher.
Trade-offs for sure.
That way I'm just maintaining a repo of Markdown files, though I could write HTML files too.
My site is "lightning fast" except for the cursed Disqus plugin, which I want to remove.