Oscar's Dev Blog


2022-05-06

Welcome to my "ugly" blog


You may have stumbled upon this Times New Roman, pale background, lightning-fast website and thought “what on earth is this? Really? In 2022?” And yes, this may not be the most coventionally beautiful website in the world; however, to me it is perfect.

It rakes in sexy 100 page-speed scores all round (on both mobile and desktop), all of the content is CMS loaded with Supabase, it’s perfectly readable and it’s fully responsive for mobile. What more could I want, than a practical way to convey my thoughts into a single-source which is accessible to all.

A trend is currently re-emerging for deveopers to step back from the 2010s idea of a virtual DOM content and return to the era of pre-rendered HTML. Funky JavaScript is great sometimes; however, what we have seen over the past 10 years is a tidal wave of JS-based web content which is (mostly) unnecessary bloat for user experience.

Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for developers and programmers at the moment. During my first visit, I didn’t really know what to think. It looked like some ugly old 90s website. Where were the strobing gifs and neon colours? (I thought to myself). What I saw instead, was a really active community with constant, engaging discussions.

The more time I spent there, the more I realised that the only thing that matters on a website like this is the content. If that’s what you came there for, then everything else becomes annoying after a short amount of time. You just need to look at websites like Reddit which have gone the opposite direction and swapped out their fast, pre-rendered website, to a js-heavy react alternative which “looks nice”. They do still have the old version live, but it has been moved to old.reddit.com. Using this mirror, I compared the page speed scores and found that they originally went from a “pass” score of 91% with the old site, to actually failing the test with an overall desktop score of 43%. I find this quite shocking but not really surprising, given the browsing experience.

The buzz-words of “web3” and “blockchain” get thrown around a lot, but the most refreshing change to see is the return of simpler and faster websites with a content-focus opposed to sensory-stimulating styling.

Don’t get me wrong, I love React. I use it for most of my projects. If you want to see nice CSS animations and fancy JavaScript then feel free to look at my portfolio. Knock yourself out. If you are building a small web app, then most of the time, ReactJs is the logical solution. The no-framework/library approach is only really susainable up to a point. Even this simple website, I have built using NextJs with server-side rendering because I find the component-approach to building websites very intuative and easily maintainable which is something that you don’t easily get without the use of a framework/library.

To summarise, it is interesting to see the direction that web development is going in 2022. The buzz-words of “web3” and “blockchain” get thrown around a lot, but the most refreshing change to see is the return of simpler and faster websites with a content-focus opposed to sensory-stimulating styling. This more basic approach may ward some people away, but on the flip-side, it may prove beneficial to the communities which they house, as it improves the experience for the users who matter the most.