K.I.S.S. principle done right
Why I 💚 example[.]com
One of my favorite websites on the internet is example.com . I love the straightforwardness and simplicity of a website that has... next to nothing. You can't say it isn't perfect because there's so little to judge it by. Like a chicken soup, or better yet - a PB&J sandwich: simple, delicious and to-the-point. Example[.]com doesn't pretend to be something it's not - it's just a placeholder website with no bells and whistles. The mere existence of example[.]com scratches a very satisfying itch I have which is a longing for simpler times (pre-2010s) - back when the internet wasn't all pop-ups, modals, javascript errors in the devtools console on first DOM load, cookie consents, shoehorned SPA functionality, notification prompts and other meaningless bloat inherited from run-of-the-mill eComm stores that try to drive conversions. I guess what I'm trying to say is example[.]com has one sole objective - display a staic HTML page with some text and it does it beautifully.
Enter: nee[.]lv - the spirit of example[.]com living on as a personal blog
I stubmled across a website in 2021 and it was like a breath of fresh air: nee.lv. Unlike example[.]com, this site is someone's personal blog, but encompasses much of example[.]com's spirit. Nee[.]lv exploded with it's single blog - "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%". As the title conveys, the person (t0st) cut the load times of GTA V's multiplayer by 70% - a solution which was later adopted by the official Rockstar devteam and added to the base game, improving the gaming experience for all! My main takeaways from this are:
- Anyone with enough curiosity and willpower to dig a bit deeper can become a rockstar overnight, especially iff it solves a common problem.
- Unless you're going for design awards, you don't need an over-the-top latest next-gen framework solution/stack overengineered futureproof website.
I'm a dev, does that mean I need my site to be tech-fancy?
That's what I used to think. My first blog site was built with simple HTML, CSS, vanilla JS and bootstrap. It was fine and I mean, it got the job done - it displayed some of my works, had a link to a /contacts page and that's about it. But I got self-conscious about finding any meaningful work with such a bare-bones website. I needed to show off my development skills, because, surely *SURELY*, my potential recruiter would inspect the site and decline if it wasn't made with a framework? So I took down the site to save myself from the embarrasement and learned just enough Vue.js to spin up a-v.dev (I even added a custom CMS on the /admin path so I could manage my blogs all in one place). Same content, different framework - now it was a SPA! Fast forward to circa 2020 or 2021 and I was searching for developer positions and stumbled across scandiweb. There, a job ad stood out to me: PWA developer. The requirements section in the job ad listed React or similar - finally, something right up my alley, because by this point, I felt comfortable enough with Vue to apply for the job. When I received the test task, I was taken aback, because I needed to make a carousel in React, not Vue...
Not one to give up, I checked the deadline - not specified, but the acceptable timeframe was 1 to 2 weeks. So I bit down, fired up tutorials on YouTube, bought a udemy course on react and got to work. I first made a simple carousel that supported infinite looping/scrolling in vanilla JS and then remade it with React. Success! While I was waiting for the test task to be reviewed, I took down a-v.dev and remade it with React this time. And so my site stayed like this for a very long time as I was too caught up with other things. By the way, I didn't get that position (for different reasons, not because the test task was bad) - I instead filled a martech specialist position - an immeasurably better alternative and one, which I am thankful 🙏 for to this day.
Full circle - back to the beginning
It is now 14-12-2024. I've long since left Scandiweb, have acquired multiple "hats" in the digital landscape and padded my portfolio quite extensively. I feel confident enough now to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a simple website. Simple == Beautiful. Overcomplication causes negativity to breed. I don't want to spin up a site with wordpress, I don't want to deploy a Strapi framework to serve as my headless CMS and I for sure don't want to re-learn React now. I want to fire up micro (yes, micro, not nano [check it out here: micro-editor]), run some git commands and have the site automatically redeploy on firebase. This kind of workflow reminds me of that scene from "The Social Network" (2010) where Mark Zuckerberk is writing up a blogpost in notepad with HTML syntax (no CMS, nothing extra) right before that cool hacking scene. I'll see if I can find a gif or something and add it here for reference.Found it
The purpose of a-v.dev
The purpose of a-v.dev is not to
- ❌ impress recruiters to find a new job
- ❌ one-up other developers
- ❌ change the industry and have everyone follow suite
- ❌ explode in popularity and become an SEO sensation and case-study
- ✅ collect all of my thoughts and works in one place
- ✅ leave a little easter-egg of myself in case someone does eventually come across this place
- ✅ give me squirt of dopamine every time I run "git push origin main" and deploy something nice