Sean Walker
2020-05-07
The question in a world of abundance is “why?”. What is the point of making yet another website?
Well, I don’t have 1500 reputation on stackoverflow, so I can’t make a janet tag, and I would also like to stop searching through gitter for questions/answers. I feel like those are perfectly reasonable reasons to make a website.
With that, I set out to use my ✨shiny ✨new web framework joy to recreate some of the bits of SO, but specifically for janet.
The first thing I think that’s really cool about joy and about the stack in general is the low memory usage: 11280 kb on a raspberry pi. No clouds here, just tiny computers serving the internet.
I mean sure a blank joy app only uses 5 MB, but 12 MB is nothing to sneeze at, and this is with some pretty FAT sqlite queries, loading quite a bit of data into memory. Not to mention, CSRF protection, full blown encrypted cookies w/ sessions, I mean if you can imagine a web framework feature, this thing has it. So, now that I can run websites off of my raspberry pi, which is $35 and not a $5/mo VPS, what’s next?
The stack still needs a little tweaking, for starters, it’s ugly. There’s no doubt about it, water.css is great for fast prototyping with a dark mode, but it comes at the expense of a few rough edges. I’m looking toward mvp.css for my next project.
The rest of the stuff can definitely stay though, I love alpine.js, it’s the perfect “framework” for already server rendered html. I’m also going to bring in turbolinks, assuming I can get rid of any flashes of unstyled content.
The stack is here to stay, I’m super happy with how fast things come together:
This is my stack. there are many like it, but this one is mine.