How I built a modern website in 2021

Articles like this are equal parts fascinating and worrisome. Fascinating because as a developer I love to see elaborate systems built to accomplish a goal. Worrisome because as a manager I have alarm bells going off in my head when I start reading about systems that get so complex that they have to add even more complexity just to tame problems introduced by earlier complexity:

First it determines all content changes that occurred between the commit that's being built and the commit of the last time there was a refresh (that value is stored in redis and my server exposes an endpoint for my action to retrieve it). If any of the changed files were in the ./content directory, then the action makes an authenticated POST request to another endpoint on my server with all the content files that were changed. Then my server retrieves all the content from the GitHub API, recompiles the MDX pages, and pushes the update to the Redis cache which Fly.io automatically propagates to the other regions.

This reduces what used to take 10-25 minutes down to 8 seconds

If my team reached the point that simple website deploys were taking 25 minutes or required long chains of API calls between bouncing between various internal and external services, I’d start to worry about what sort of complexity we’ve built into our stack. On one hand their solution is neat, but on the other hand I can’t help but worry about how we got here in the first place. More importantly: Why? What does this complexity give us that we couldn't achieve with a simpler solution? Imagine being asked to take over this project and having to understand the long chain of events required just to get new content into the website.

I understand these articles are meant to be a showcase of technologies and how they can be used, but I’ve also seen a lot of otherwise simple webdev projects spiral into unnecessarily complex projects like this. I've also mentored a lot of juniors who think their companies are doing something wrong if they're not building complexity-first web projects or they're not using a long checklist of the hottest webdev tools.

These complex projects are fun to work on and learn, but it becomes a huge burden to maintain. The webdev world moves so fast that a project built on 15 different trendy projects will inevitably have some of them fall out of favor or become deprecated each year. Any long-term project like this will inevitably start losing time to constant refactoring and rebuilding around the newest trendy components each year.

It’s critically important for these teams to have some oversight in the form of someone asking pointed questions about whether or not each additional layer of complexity is truly necessary. Some times the most elegant solutions are also the most painful maintenance nightmares down the road as the original architects cycle out of the company.

Side note: As much as I appreciate all of the great free learning resources made available by authors like this, I can't get past the inherent conflict of interest involved with educators advocating for complex projects and then selling learning materials to understand them. This seems especially common in the webdev world where the popular tooling changes from year to year and can require a lot of learning to get it right. Sure enough, this blog post ends with a call to purchase tickets to learning workshops to understand what's going on here:

It's been a ton of fun and I'm excited to put my learnings into blog posts and workshops to teach you the specifics of how I did this stuff so you can do it too. In fact, I've already scheduled some workshops for you to attend! Pick up tickets now.

As always: Caveat emptor. Complex projects are fun, but don't assume that a modern website must be complex.

This guy is a snake oil salesman most likely. This is an utterly contrived and overly complicated setup to run a personal site / signup form for paid lessons. Any experienced engineer worth their salt will eye roll at this but I know junior engineers who would just eat this up.

"Hi, I'm Kent C. Dodds. I'm a world renowned speaker, teacher, and trainer ..." - https://kentcdodds.com/info World renowned is an extreme stretch. I have never heard of this guy, so if he is even renowned, it is only in the frontend JS world.

https://kentcdodds.com/discord#reasons-to-join While I personally like Discord, I have become extremely wary of people with something to sell advertising a Discord server. You see the same tactic with the crypto and NFT people, where you create what feels like an informal, fun, collaborative space, but really it is an attempt to create a self-sustaining social scene around a specific brand.

Then onto his LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentcdodds/). He worked at Paypal for a while, preceded by a bunch of no names, and has some weird Google developer certification. Not really the resume of someone who can charge $600 (!) for a course in some frontend BS that will be out of date in 6 months.

His Github has a ton of activity and to his credit it does look to actually largely be "real" and not just gamifying LOC/# of commit metrics.

This guy may well be a react/frontend expert, or at least competent in the space, but this website is just a grift targeting inexperienced engineers.

$600, for a React course, are you serious? I know it's 20 hours of content, but so are many Udemy courses.

Many similar courses can be found for $10-$20 on Udemy.com (be sure to reset cookies/create a new account if you see higher prices. Apparently they only show discounted prices to new customer accounts.). For $600, a person could probably buy the majority or even entirety of Udemy.com's React courses -- Maybe somewhere around 500-1000 hours of content (rough estimation).

For example, this course has for 48 hours of content for $20. https://www.udemy.com/course/react-tutorial-and-projects-course/

I've found Udemy has great content. Plus there's Youtube.

Kent, I understand that you're a solo entrepreneur and that you offer premium knowledge in your content. But I wouldn't pay more than $100. I don't think the knowledge you offer is monopolized by your course, I think it can be found through many other learning resources (books, videos, docs).

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Edit: just found out via another comment that Kent developed react-testing-library. That's awesome. So, Kent is likely someone who knows a ton about ReactJS, including truly expert, insider knowledge.

That said, $600 is still a crazy amount to charge to consumers. Maybe you'd charge that at an in-person seminar/workshop.

But to the internet public in general? Seems greedy.

It seems web development devolves more and more from "use the right tool for the job" and KISS (not that it ever fully was either) to "use all the tools you can find for the job" and focus on process instead of product.

While I appreciate that a lot of things have gotten more straight forward since I started mid 2000s, the cynic in me can't help but think that the primary reason for many of those tools to exist is to sell SaaS subscriptions, consultancy services, courses and certifications, not to solve a real world users problem.

I wonder what the impact of this on the field is going to be long term. The barrier of entry has gotten insanely high with all the tools you supposedly need to know. Yes of course you can still learn it the "old fashioned" way, but that's not what you will find/perceive when you look how to get started. What I see quite a bit in interviews for juniors devs is, that they know a whole lot of different tools and technologies, but often have a very shallow understanding how to solve non tutorial problems with them. Which is not per se a problem, it's something you learn on the job. But I often see a unwillingness to dig deeper, get a more profound understanding instead of immediately trying to solve a problem in one tool by adding yet another. Steadily increasing system complexity and making it harder to maintain.

I love my overengineered web site / playground. Yes, I hid a text adventure in the site header. Yes, it is full of stuff that no-one will care about. It's my art and my passion.

I put all my cool code there and I over engineer it to death. It's awesome - it's fun - it's what you should do if you love coding. Guess what - I also have a table full of electronic projects, I've made unfinished games, I've done hackathons, it's great and we should embrace that.

Perhaps Kent Dobbs likes experimenting with new technology and trying new stuff. Perhaps his own personal web site is a place where he can do whatever he wants.

If you criticize him for that... well let's just say, I doubt your ability to code - and you are banned from my nerd club. If you don't take joy in an overengineered personal web site - then you are doing it wrong.

Seriously, speed runners spend months trying to save milliseconds on a mario speed run and you want to whine about a software engineer taking joy in his craft...

Ok, that's my rant.

I support freedom, I support the free web, I support the proliferation of code and over-engineered solutions.