I haven’t touched frontend code for a couple years now, but I have a long history with it. I’ve been making websites since I was a kid, used to write Rails apps for work, lots of JS and jQuery, various CSS frameworks, and even used React for a while when it was initially released. And lots of other frameworks of course. So I’m not new to this stuff. I just had an idea for a side project and I want to make a modern website. I spent the last 20 hours trying to figure out what the best practices are now. Everything should’ve gotten easier, right? It has been 10 years after all. But I’m totally lost. 4 layers of bundlers. Two layers of language abstractions. CSS frameworks that need to be compiled!? Several more layers of database abstractions and services that I have no idea what they do by looking at their landing pages. My requirements are pretty simple. I want it to work on all devices and look good. I need some user authentication and user state, but nothing complex. The data model is relatively simple, but it needs to be stored somewhere, local storage is not enough. From all my research, my best bet right now seems to be next.js + React + Tailwind because that combination seems to be relatively popular and well-documented with good editor integrations. Not sure what to use for the database/backend though. I also looked at htmx but don’t really like the idea of templating html snippets on the server without great editor integration. So, how do I actually make a modern website? Is it really this hard? (I’m aware there have been similar threads the past year, but they’re already a year old, which is an eternity in JS world)
Story Published at: May 16, 2023 at 09:53AM
Story Published at: May 16, 2023 at 09:53AM