I reduced the size of my ridiculously large (123 kB) home page

The other day I was reading Dan Luu's post on speeding up his site by 50x. Not bad, Dan, I thought. But as someone who is essentially running a hand coded static website (generated by my home made static site generator) I thought I'd have him beat in terms of page size. Even with a bit of styling! I totally didn't. And it was never even close. Nevertheless, when I loaded up the network tab of dev tools, I was horrified to see that my home page had ballooned to 123 kB. That might not seem like much. To someone who cares about minimising the footprint of their website, it is. Contrary to Dan, who looks at user engagement to see if his efforts have yielded positive results, I optimise for a single user: myself. More often than you'd think, I find myself questioning why I even go through the effort of keeping this site accessible online at all. Although I know that ‘someone, sometimes’ will read something I post, in my head there are nobody else besides myself and a million bots keeping…