Starting back at 0.
Getting back to the basics of web development
In the past few years, I've used lots of modern technologies, frameworks, and tools to create webapps. I wanted to get back to the basics starting here at plain HTML.
I plan to keep iterations of this site when moving from basic HTML with CSS, to HTML with CSS and Vanilla JS, then finally, a full framework with TypeScript like React, Next, etc.
Why?
This sort of idea had been on my mind for a while; going back to the basics. With this idea in mind, I came across this video from Theodore Bendixson that reinforced those thoughts: Watch Video
Learning to Program
It came to the fore when I decided to really focus on learning to program, not just building off of frameworks, tons of libraries, and boilerplate projects. I realized that I'd come to depend too much on these tools and was barely sure on how to start from zero.
Room for Tools
There is, of course, room for these tools. Getting a fully-featured product or tool off the ground can not be done with as many features and in as short a time without those shortcuts.
The Journey
I've built tools, scripts, and sites at work for internal use, but given the timeframes I'd always lean on the frameworks, libraries, and boilerplate to get things done.
This also and especially applies to AI tools. I personally have used a few AI tools over the last few months including: ChatGPT, CodeGPT, TabNine, Sourcegraph's Cody, Perplexity, and now JetBrains integrated AI assistant. My increased usage and reliance on these tools led me to the realization that has started all this.
I was making my currently in-development RSS reader tool, started in response to the Reddit situation, and was stuck in two places.
The first was that there are so many frameworks for the front-end and back-end and full-stack etc. that I was stuck in decision paralysis. On the one hand, I've worked with Typescript, React, and ExpressAPI enough that I could feasibly start there or use a similar framework like Next.JS.
On the other hand, I wanted to get more experience with Python, and recently seeing some cool things built with Django I thought I'd start down that path.