After years of building thick JavaScript front-ends, I started questioning my ability to write minimal web products. Therefore, I embarked on a journey that led me to the creation of this blog.
I just wanted to say this, it fills me with an unreasonable amount of joy to be able to say this. For those who might not immediately empathize, I will try to explain myself.
I am part of that generation of developers that started writing web applications in the post-React era. I wrote my first todo apps in React, Vue, and later on, Svelte.
However, I am also a 90s kid, and I remember stealing HTML and CSS from my favorite websites to build my own PHP-powered chat-based RPGs in the early 2000s (more on this one day).
Because of this original, more intimate (pass me the term), experience with the web, I always had mixed feelings about how numbly I was adding kB of dependencies to a web dashboard consumed by few hundred users. Lately, I started strongly revaluating my relationship with the web technologies I have used to develop basically all of my projects since I can recall (React, Express, GraphQL, tRPC, and many others).
This process started with the eye-opening experience of reading Hypermedia Systems, the book by the creators of htmx. They question the indiscriminated proliferation of thick web frontends.