Static websites.

I love static websites.

I wrote my first one in 1998, when I was eight years old. Back then, HTML3 and CSS2 were the cutting edge technology for making just those.

Over 20 years later, not much has happened to further this goal.
And for good reason; it already worked. Well.

The generator I’m using for this blog, Hugo, builds and serves a webpage during active development in roughly 20ms. Compared to the frontend-projects I work on professionally, this is upwards of two orders of magnitude faster than an average SPA spends loading. Anecdotally, the time spent building and maintaining either is of equal difference.

Apples to oranges? Yes. The two solutions solve different problems. Arguing for one over the other makes assumptions on how the final product is to be consumed. That conversation however, sets the trend for further development and maintenance years down the line. It’s always easy to add complexity, it is substantially harder to remove it.

Start with simplicity. Complect when needed. For that purpose,
I love static websites.