The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
The tech stack for my personal blog is a &lt;100 line Python script that reads a directory of plaintext files and drops them into Jinja2 templates. It&#x27;s longer than it needs to be because I wasn&#x27;t feeling like being clever when I wrote it, so to produce the RSS feed it just starts the whole thing over again with some copypasta from the first time around. I know that with some smarter use of Jinja I could eliminate that whole step and be &lt;50 lines.<p>It&#x27;s really just a (bad) static site generator, it&#x27;s just that every static site generator I&#x27;ve run into so far was way more complicated than I need and so it was faster to write my own with only the three features I want than to learn a big complicated tool.<p>I guess I have mixed feelings here. It makes sense to invest time in a complicated setup for a personal website as a hobby project, and I am quite clear that I am not a software person so that&#x27;s just not something that really interests me as a way to spend my time. Spending a ton of time &quot;developing a blog&quot; feels to me like it&#x27;s just a big roadblock in the way of actually, you know, blogging. I acknowledge that a good part of that is personal preference.<p>On the other hand... much of the post really concerns me. The author talks about React and TS like they&#x27;re the only alternative to writing bare JS. Well, for one, there are other, simpler options even within the TS ecosystem. For another, the website doesn&#x27;t really seem to have any behavior that requires JS, so I&#x27;m not sure why JS needs to be involved in the first place.<p>The rejection of using MD along with React seems like... a damning condemnation of React? Is it really that hard? People tolerate that?<p>The assertion that most CMSs require two round-trips to deliver the content speaks of someone who has not really seen the world outside of modern JS front-end... It would be very uncommon for a CMS in another language to require more than one round-trip, as the content is prepared server-side before delivery of any kind of front-end.<p>I guess, if I am to be opinionated (which I certainly will be), my feeling is that the author should have spent their hobby time exploring the world <i>outside</i> of React rather than hammering what seems like a rather round peg into a rather square hole, and then presenting it as &quot;ideal.&quot;