My stack will outlive yours

Steren (who happens to be PM for the wonderful Cloud Run):

My stack requires no maintenance, has perfect Lighthouse scores, will never have any security vulnerability, is based on open standards, is portable, has an instant dev loop, has no build step and… will outlive any other stack.

It’s not LAMP, WordPress, Rails, MEAN, Jamstack… I don’t do CSR (Client-side rendering), SSR (Server Side Rendering), SSG (Static Site Generation)…

My stack is HTML+CSS.

In practice this no-CMS/no-DB approach can be hard to maintain but for Steren’s blog — which sports no categories, no pagination, no next/prev, … — this “Boring by Default” approach is more than enough.

Of course you can still use your favorite static site generator to generate your markup, yet the main message to remember here is this:

You don’t need WordPress, or Hugo to put a blog online, or Angular, React or Next.js to put a web page online. Raw HTML and CSS do the job.

To start you can keep it simple. The basic building blocks of the web can get you quite far already.

My stack will outlive yours →

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Join the Conversation

2 Comments

    1. Of course. The main gist to remember is that you can already get quite far with only HTML and CSS.

      Nowadays many people seem to get into the web somewhere right in the middle, missing out on the core basics. I always think of a story Jeremy Keith once told (in a presentation? on his blog?), where he had an intern that wanted to link two pages together and they were under the impression that they needed react-router for that. Apparently the a element was unknown to them. (Bonkers, I know!)

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.