No compilers. No bundlers. Just a generator.

This site is now a static site using Eleventy. It used to be a server-rendered Next.js app. Now, there’s no TypeScript, no PostCSS, no module bundler, no frameworks, and no server. The mean response time went down from 1.7 seconds to 130ms. And yet, when I fix a typo or publish a post, it’s updated pretty much instantly, as if it were a server-rendered app. And rewriting it was so much fun! Tinkering was fun until it wasn’t anymore I was getting sick of taming dependencies, especially with the increasing amount of CVEs over the last months. Next.js updates were constantly breaking something. To make the site fast, I had to use experimental features, which of course kept breaking with updates. But not updating meant I couldn’t apply new performance improvements. Not mentioning that not updating sometimes meant dealing with security issues. And despite using all the performance optimization tricks, the site still felt slow. Because it was slow! I spent more and more time configuring…

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