Captures the nightmare of trying to blog something as a web developer.<p>Step 1 - Set up your own custom blog<p>Many steps later..<p>What happened? Who am I? What did I even want to write about?
The argument about tolerable complexity definitely resonated with me.<p>However, I think the author may have failed to consider that the people using Gatsby/Next/etc. for their personal blog aren't necessarily doing so because they believe it is the best tool for the job. It's might be a good excuse to explore some new technology. Other times it could be the tool someone is most familiar with.<p>As for the solution, I believe existing tools like make could have solved the "rework" problem.<p>For reloading, I'm not sure I understand the leap from "I need to inject some JavaScript" to "I need to be able to parse a HTML document". If you're already replacing placeholders in the template with your content, why not another with some JavaScript?<p>There's also an interesting trend happening with development tooling like Snowpack and Vite. Instead of recompiling your assets when things change, why not let the HTTP server compile them on the fly? You don't need to worry about dependency graphs because the browser will request the assets it needs. Your development server can send events when a requested asset is touched and some injected JavaScript can handle the reloading.
And then the whole solution dies because it's slow and not scalable due to the hot reloader plus number of users.<p>A CDN is pulled in holding a list of changes or something, adding yet more complexity that could have been avoided using a performant caching web server in the first place, and a properly implemented hot reloader.
(Well into millions of requests.)<p>Naivete is not well rewarded on the web.
Side note: It's a pretty website, but the text is quite hard to read.
Note necessarily a problem if you want to filter out people that favor content over form, just something to be aware of.
Can someone explain what point the author is trying to prove?<p>That a custom build framework with a limited feature set. Has less complexity than a general framework with more features?