npm ruin dev

In 2020, I rediscovered the joy of building websites with pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript—no translation or compilation required, the build tools were my keyboard.

My personal brand can be summarized as “too late to join the game, the stadium has been removed”, so I decided to start the podcast in 2020. This is a podcast from our company Clearleft, which has a very imaginative name: "Clearleft Podcast". I am very satisfied with the results of the first season and the website I built for it.

Although the website is not large in size, it will grow and grow over time. I thought about the website construction process, and after a few seconds of thinking, I decided to adopt the "no build process". zero. There is nothing.

It turns out that this is very liberating. It's easy to write HTML and CSS that will be delivered to the end user without any intermediate links, and it feels very useful. I feel like I am working on the soil of the website with my own hands.

CSS has developed a lot in recent years—such as calc() and custom properties—so there is no need to use preprocessors like Sass. Native JavaScript is powerful, fully functional, and can run in all browsers without any compilation.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand why complex websites require complex build processes. If you are part of a large team, you may need to develop processes so that everyone can contribute to the code base in a consistent way. The more complex the code base is, the more technology is needed to help you automate your work and catch errors before your code goes live.

However, this setting does not work for every website. All these tools and processes designed to save time sometimes end up wasting more time later. Have you ever revisited a project after six or twelve months? Maybe you just want to make a small change to your CSS. But you can't do it because the dependency is corrupted. So you try to update it. But it depends on different versions of Node. Did you know that you were like Brian Cranston changing light bulbs. You should only adjust one line of CSS, but end up fighting entropy.

Whenever I deal with problems in front-end development, I like to apply the principle of least competency: choose the least powerful language for a specific purpose. A classic example is using simple HTML button elements instead of trying to recreate all the native features of a button using a div with a lot of ARIA and JavaScript. This year, I realized that the same principle applies to building tools.

I won't use a fully functional toolchain by default, but start with a boring baseline. If and when it gets too painful or clumsy, I'll add a task manager. But every time I add a dependency, I limit the lifecycle of the project.

My New Year’s Plan for 2021 is dieting. There are no more huge node_modules folders; there are only simple and delicious HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

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