Congratulations on your new blog_
10/17/2024
After getting bogged down for several weeks trying to set some reasonable goals for a personal homepage refresh, I realized that I simply needed to be more impulsive and move as quickly as possible.
I had to triangulate a few concerns. For one thing, I'm trying to stay au courrant with at least a few trends in the world of web development. To that end, after — I don't know — eleven, 12 years? I've decided to use React via Next.js to statically generate this site.
A few pain points to mention so far:
- first of all, I've been so devoted to the web platform that the layers of abstraction away from it that these tools represent are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how much they help or hinder my productivity.
- I'm finding jsx a bit ergonomically awkward. I far prefer lit-html, which uses tagged template literals and very modest extension of HTML sytnax. Still, it's a far sight better than, say, Twig.
- React is incredibly prescriptive in very annoying ways. The first example that comes to mind is the enforcement of assigning keys to child elements rendered from arrays. In many cases, arrays are static; or so small, re-rendering everything would be trivial. There will be console errors about it until you add them. It's as though raw performance is the most important aspect than the use-case or developer experience.