Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

https://clairefro.dev/blog/p/look-ma-no-react-why-i-recoded-my-portfolio-site-with-vanilla-everything

by marjipan200 • 3 years ago

117 166 3 years ago

clairefro.dev

zeroonetwothree• 3 years ago

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point?

Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

arrowsmith4• 3 years ago

Is this news at this point?

If you started your career in the last 5-10 years then yes, it might be news.

An entire generation of web developers has been trained to think that every app big and small needs to be a convoluted SPA. The results are a disaster.

eropple7• 3 years ago

"A convoluted SPA" is fully orthogonal to React. If you're making a blog into a SPA, that's a you problem. It's been possible (and recommended for many things!) to just bake a static website with React and use JSX as a templating language for a long time.

PrimeMcFly3• 3 years ago

You think they would have discovered Flask or something similar just out of personal curiosity.

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

I like the colors. It's readable for me and it reminds me of sherbert.

edit: hm, she says it's a yaki imo / satsuma imo color theme. I love yaki imo.

BiteCode_dev• 3 years ago

You don't understand, it's the future !

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycles

uxcolumbo3• 3 years ago

It's not just you.

The site has poor contrast ratio - fails all accessibility guidelines for text contrast ratio requirements.

creata2• 3 years ago

Really? Firefox says the contrast ratios meet WCAG AA.

For me, the main problem is the font weight. I'm sure it looks better on high-density displays, but it is way too thin to read comfortably at a regular pixel density.

SkyPuncher3• 3 years ago

I use React for static sites and really enjoy it.

* as it’s simplest, it’s a really easy to use templating tool.

* there are a tools that compile to mostly static HTML, so not performance hits

* theres almost always something that pushes you to want some JS. React is handy to have. It also opens the door to all of the the community packages. No sense to re-invent the wheel.

TX81Z3• 3 years ago

Curious what you mean by “almost always something” that makes you use JS?

What besides shitty/illegal tracking code and cookies do you need to include? Honest question.

eimrine• 3 years ago

Can I write a React app and recompile it as a vanilla? For example to take all involved parts of the library and not take the rest.

eropple7• 3 years ago

That doesn't really parse. React as a thing is some pretty thin DOM manipulation and some helper stuff. Are you thinking of something like Next or some all-in React+Redux stack?

recursive• 3 years ago

As misfortune would have it, I spent a significant fraction of the day reading the implementation of hooks for fibers. There's nothing light weight about virtual Dom, reconciliation, and micro task queues.

willsmith725• 3 years ago

You mean a normal react build?

wooly_bully• 3 years ago

This is what Svelte does, React has a runtime even when bundled

llanowarelves• 3 years ago

Is that like Astro?

naillo• 3 years ago

The reason react was developed is mostly null at this point. Modern javascript is so fast and plesant it's hard to imagine many real reasons you can't stay entirely within vanilla.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

React wasn’t created because JS is slow, but rather to streamline and speed up DOM operations.

quest88• 3 years ago

That statement indicates you don't know why react was developed.

cj2• 3 years ago

That statement indicates you don't know why react was developed.

Why was it developed?

post-it2• 3 years ago

I find state management to be much easier with React. "All state is lost by default when any variable changes" is a fantastic starting point.

tjoff• 3 years ago

* [...] brought to you by vanilla everything. No Javascript frameworks, CSS libraries or flashy animations. [...] *

Proceeds with a distracting animated image of the old portfolio, thought that was funny.

beej713• 3 years ago

But not flashy! :)

awestroke• 3 years ago

React is a great tool for building complex, large applications. Your blog is not large or complex.

arrowsmith4• 3 years ago

It's barely even an "application". The entire thing could be rendered as static HTML.

bdcravens9• 3 years ago

Even many sites that are large and complex would benefit from being a server-rendered app. I've come across way too many sites that break in bizarre ways, and all they are doing is displaying text or HTML forms. Every time I check, they are React or Angular sites.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

I think this is a pretty awesome statement. I'm always unreasonably pleased when I see a web page that embraces appropriate simplicity.

Coding a basic vanilla multi-page application (MPA) saves time in development (goodbye babel/postcss/SSR config) and builds are fast (this site builds in less than 1.2 seconds).

I'd hope that builds would be on the order of a small pile of milliseconds! (or zero: a site like that could just be handcoded, really).

I'm only using these 2 lines of Javascript to add the current year in the footer copyright tag

This could also be eliminated. At least in the US, there is no legal reason to add a copyright notice at all, and you certainly don't have to add a year. Those requirements were removed years ago.

But, if all you want is the year, why not do that server-side? Or bake it into the html and set up a bit of automation to replace the year with a new one every Jan 1.

beej713• 3 years ago

why not do that server-side? Or bake it into the html and set up a bit of automation to replace the year with a new one every Jan 1.

In this case I think I'd argue that the JS solution is the most simple to implement+maintain.

sfn424• 3 years ago

This is what Js is good at. It sucks for building actual systems but it's fine for small stuff

robertoandred3• 3 years ago

There's zero need to set up babel/postcss/SSR. Those have all been handled by frameworks for years and years.

jallen_dot_dev• 3 years ago

Is it even correct to automatically update the year? Shouldn't the year be whenever the work was created or revised? Which could be set at build time.

Another advantage of setting it in the build is it'd show even without javascript. If I disable JS, no copyright statement at all appears on the page. So if it was really necessary to declare your copyright, then would it mean anyone who disables JS can freely infringe?

I agree just leaving the copyright out of the footer would be best.

adregan• 3 years ago

I am of the opinion that what you are suggesting is correct. You don’t want a programmatic copyright because you want the copyright to reflect the date created as that when the right begins, and it continues from there without need for refreshing.

terminatornet• 3 years ago

I think it's also incorrect because it's getting the date client side. so it would just display the local client's year, not necessarily the correct one.

degun2• 3 years ago

Jumping on the React hate train has become a trend these days, but it still has its place.

shmde• 3 years ago

Shitting on React is one of the easiest way to reach the HN frontpage.

thiht• 3 years ago

Of course it has its place. Not for a blog though, it makes no sense

degun2• 3 years ago

You can achieve very good results with Next, by using SSG, SSR and ISR. That implies being very comfortable with React. Otherwise there’s tons of solutions for a blog scrnario.

rmilejczz2• 3 years ago

It doesn’t really matter what you write your personal blog in lol I’ve created some egregiously over engineered personal projects over the years just for the sake of learning a new technology

bdcravens9• 3 years ago

It has its place, but there's no shortage of React sites where it's misplaced.

pwdisswordfishc• 3 years ago

React hate train has its place indeed.

carlossouza• 3 years ago

I became a dev when everyone was hiring for React, so React is what I taught myself immediately after bootcamp in the scramble for a job

A better education path (in a bootcamp, university, book, youtube, whatever) would start with the fundamentals and build it from the ground up... not the other way around.

(I just realized how lucky I am for being taught in the best possible order, from the ground up... first the basics... and how so many people didn't have this opportunity)

yoavm• 3 years ago

Agreed, but it's so rare nowadays though. I still remember when I saw a junior frontend dev struggling to get some element to look differently when hovered in React. They went though loops and hoops to style it using CSS-in-JS and mousemove, only because they didn't hear about :hover.

revskill2• 3 years ago

Then what ? That junior dev could produce working software, and fix the css issue later (if needed).

Give that "senior CSS developer" a day and figure out how to manage state, then what you get is a crap.

gedy• 3 years ago

My favorite experience with Bootcamp folks was someone who came in do an interview, and she could talk, was professional, had nice looking blogs, etc. and seemed really awesome on paper. However, I had her do a really simple React exercise, and she was producing some really strange code like using Ruby inside of a JavaScript onClick handler? lol

I think a failing of a lot of these bootcamps is they encourage people to present themselves as more experienced than they actually are. I don’t mind someone who’s starting out, and has a lot of potential, but please be honest about your skill level, as it just disappoints the interviewer and misrepresents you.

teg4n_3• 3 years ago

Seems like just lack of experience. You can even do it simply with JS with onHoverIn / onHoverOut

syx• 3 years ago

I think most of this comes down to the fact that these bootcamps are there to freshly bake people to work on the latest shiny tech completely ignoring the basics of computer science. I, like yourself, was very lucky to attend a university course that gave me exactly those fundamentals.

beej713• 3 years ago

I worked at a boot camp that started off CS-"heavy" (relative to other boot camps). Unfortunately, they gradually just turned into a React shop to try to maximize profits. There were students who had been in the program for 4 months and couldn't write FizzBuzz. The placement rate was poor because students couldn't do technical interviews. I understand this particular company has made improvements since then (I've left), but it was fucking grim at the time. I now teach at a state university.

But yes, to anyone in a boot camp, get yourself some Khan Academy or whatever you need to get the fundamentals. This is an art, a science, and a craft, and you need to study to show your pride in that craft.

mettamage2• 3 years ago

Not always. The bootcamp I worked for did 2 months of pure HTML/CSS/JS and then did a personal project for another month of which students almost exclusively used HTML/CSS/JS, some did React. Only in the final week did I teach React.

This was around 2017, most students didn't become React devs. Most students did end up in the JS ecosystem, but 30% did something else [1].

[1] When I say 30%, that's not an official statistics. It's just on my impression what I've personally seen from students who connected to me on LinkedIn. It's a guestimate at best.

bdcravens9• 3 years ago

I think there's a place for what are essentially factory workers: taught specific skills for specific jobs. The problem is I think most don't understand the trade-offs and have unbalanced expectations.

bdcravens9• 3 years ago

For me, coming online in the late 1990s, I've never experienced as much "education density" as I did when learning HTML to build sites on Geocities. For those who didn't experience that, circa 1997, you could either upload files or write HTML in nothing more than a textfield. No highlighting, no WYSIWYG, no page builders. Just you and a blank canvas (if you were lucky you might use an editor like Homesite or HotDog)

zhte415• 3 years ago

It was also a time of DIYing shopping carts in cookies, forums all about getting payments working, and what's HTTPS?

tzhenghao• 3 years ago

Yeah, I was just chatting with another principal eng friend recently where maybe a whole new generation of programmers may be several degrees away from topics like operating systems, compilers, computer security and networking.

Once in a while, (lower level) software needs to be rewritten as underlying invariants go out of fashion. Think filesystems due to hardware access patterns etc. - to unlock magnitudes of performance improvements. The scary part is maybe we'll never have enough programmers to know how to do "the hard stuff" anymore. I hope I'm proven wrong though!

pc862• 3 years ago

This is sort of a FUD argument IMO. There will always be people who focus on low level software engineering. There will always be people who want to learn about the hardware of computers much more than the software. Proportionally there will almost certainly be less (we don't need nearly as many computer engineers as we do software engineers) but as long as the salaries remain competitive there will be plenty.

augusto-moura• 3 years ago

It depends on the intention of the person trying to learn. When someone is starting and asks to me which language/tech is best to start, I always ask, what do you want from learning tech? Are you comfortable with X salary? Do you want to make a career of it? Go international/remote? Etc.

I had some friends being honest about only wanting some good money, not top high, but in comfortable zone, and preferably fast, in less than a year. With that kinda of mentality, I usually recommend going straight to the most used stack where I live, React, Angular or Java.

They are usually just starting and want to feel the waters, I tell about the basics and link some online courses. Everyone can start on one tech and learn another later.

I myself learned frontend before high school and only had a formal education on software years later on college, and now I feel like pretty proficient on software as a whole. The answer to it, is usually giving some time and experience

Twirrim• 3 years ago

We had an intern last year, and I got a chance to do a 1-on-1 with him later on on his time with us. He was looking for some insights from the engineer in the org with the longest career in tech.

The biggest single thing I think I ended up doing during that session was getting him to re-frame his thinking from "I'm a React developer" to "I'm a developer", emphasising how all the fundamentals remain the same, just the nitty gritty implementation changes a bit from time to time. It was interesting to watch that lightbulb moment happening with him as we were talking, while also frustrating that the bootcamp etc. training he'd been through had so fundamentally set his thinking up wrong from the outset (since had a few more interns that came via different bootcamps, and it has been the same story with each!)

randomdata2• 3 years ago

And that's why learning is best left as an individual pursuit. For me, it is always best to start with a complex system and then work backwards, understanding the thoughts and decisions that went into each step along the way. When I start with the basics I don't get a feel for the bigger picture and it means nothing.

I'm glad I've only been around the industry for 25-some-odd years. We already had many high level abstractions to work with. If I were old like you and had to start with flipping toggle switches, I'm sure I would have zoned out immediately and never progressed further.

I could handle flipping toggle switches now, but only because I've been engrossed in the bigger picture thanks to those high level abstractions.

pc862• 3 years ago

I hate to break it to you but if you've been in the professional world for 25 years, you're old :)

agumonkey• 3 years ago

I have a strange feeling about the industry. It seems better received to know a framework 30% (or enough to make simple/intermediate things) even if you know next to nothing about the underlyings rather than the opposite. If you're an ES6 master but can't mesh well with react tasks / react convos in daily you will look as less useful.

majesticglue2• 3 years ago

I disagree. It's like telling someone who is somewhat interested in building cars to learn how an engine works before having them on the ground playing with the actual car parts. The issue becomes not whether they'll learn, it's about whether they WANT to continue to learn. Most people when they want to start coding, would rather want to build cool things. And then later on, they'll naturally be more interested in the fundamentals.

I argue that this is why schools are terrible for teaching. They try and teach fundamentals without making kids interested in the topic first. As someone who taught many kids, the struggle is always making them interested, not the rate at which they learn.

I remember when I started programming, the worst advice i got was on stack overflow, that I should learn from this thick c++ textbook as a start... Wasted couple months on that book, where the concepts went through one ear and out the other, became extremely disinterested. Only until someone told me to just learn Javascript and build things was when I progressed and learned rapidly. Took me only a year after that to get a job with me becoming interested very quickly on learning fundamentals from there. If I kept learning from a book, it would've taken me several years before I got to even building. It's silly to assume someone who learns from the top down can't learn the fundamentals at some point.

Now I've learned game development and currently learning ai on the side. I've tried bottoms up learning many times, but it is incredibly slow to get my goals. Top down and learning fundamentals after you get your hands dirty has been the absolute fastest way for me to learn new topics. With bottoms up, while you may learn many of the basics, you also happen to learn a bunch of extraneous information that you may never use, and will forget because you don't use it.

c-hendricks4• 3 years ago

There's space between "read this giant c++ tome" and "you're good to go with a couple of months of React", quite a lot even.

From my experience with bootcamp people, it leaves them woefully underprepared. But my sample size is small: 3 people, 3 separate bootcamps, similar results. They knew one portion of react, no fundamentals.

And sadly a couple of them really took to using Copilot. So they don't know how to do what they're doing and couldn't explain their submitted code.

Just the worst of all worlds there. They were effectively incredibly expensive Copilot subscriptions (not to belittle them, they did that themselves)

Spivak• 3 years ago

I don't know anyone who has ever learned programming bottom up. Now growing with the technology as it evolves is one thing, but being taught in that manner is miserable because it's unmotivated and the reason for the low level is the high level not the other way around. You just use even handlers in JS and then when you hit some confusing behavior you dive in at learn about how event propagation works.

Nobody learns block how devices work before filesystems because it's backwards. Filesystems are the motivation, block devices are a means. The processors course in college comes after the intro programming and after systems programming.

throwaway675309• 3 years ago

I love when people say this, because everyone has a different relative arbitrary starting point for the term "basic".

So let's take you, for example.

How far back did you start ? Did you write a basic HTML site in notepad?

Did you program your own TCP/IP stack?

Of course you at least configured the actual Web server using Apache on your Debian vps, right?

See how tired this argument is?

As for me, I just directly manipulate the platters of my hard drive using a magnetized needle to encode sequences of ones and zeros.

lazypenguin• 3 years ago

None of these things are fundamentals

treffer• 3 years ago

The opportunity one is really the core. A friend went through a bootcamp. Father of 3. I think this is the most viable option to join the field for him.

So the options are bootcamp or not. Not from the ground up or not. Bootcamps cater thst group. Ideally skilled, smart, willing to learn but on a tight schedule and in need of a job.

This also changed my mind a bit on how to think about bootcamps. They are a way to give people who couldn't afford a longer education on the discipline an entry point.

All the success or failure is still on the person, and there is a lot to learn, but I respect everyone going through the hard path.

city41• 3 years ago

My website is also completely static, but made with React. That means no React at all at runtime, it is completely static. React does not automatically mean dynamic. I get all the benefits of both. I love the flexibility nextjs provides here.

embit• 3 years ago

Yes this is correct. It’s perfectly possible to build purely static website by react and nextjs

asynchronous• 3 years ago

NextJS really does feel like a featherweight React in all the best ways

SkyPuncher3• 3 years ago

I love React as a templating language. I find it very easy to use since JSX is very close to actual html.

willsmith725• 3 years ago

I don't get the value prop of all vanilla. The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have. Sure CRA was slow, but vite makes things sub-second again.

It's like when remix people talk about progressive enhancement to me. Sure, cool, you can do things differently. But why? If you already know the ins and outs of a framework or tool and are productive with it, use it. I'm never gonna hire someone because of how much they "flexed" with their vanilla site, just like I won't hire someone who flexed with their cool fresh-from-bootcamp react animations.

aobdev2• 3 years ago

It’s not a value prop, it’s just a statement of remembering to use the right tools. You even mention this yourself, just not explicitly, when you say “react app” and “vanilla site”. They serve different purposes and I’ve worked with many people who do not understand because react is all they know.

Remix is an improvement over react as a framework though because you can fall back on native browser functionality where the framework will fall short (high latency, slow devices, no JavaScript).

willsmith725• 3 years ago

remembering to use the right tools

100% agree here. But if I were going to rewrite a whole application, I'd need a really good value prop.

high latency, slow devices, no JavaScript

I don't see why high latency would be improved by remix, you're still fetching everything it's just without the waterfall. I've yet to see a modern-ish device (going back to iPhone 7s) that struggle so hard with rendering that progressive enhancement is valuable.

Are there modern devices which are that slow? Or browsers without js?

smarkov• 3 years ago

The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have.

All the tooling we have is exactly why React has an overhead which is far from nil. Every package goes through a period of changing its best practices, some go through multiple. Entire packages go in and out of season, seemingly depending on the phase of the moon. There's a new bundler every year, each with its own quirks. For some things there's 4 "go to" packages that achieve the same thing but take a different path to get there. You have all these packages and tooling you have to learn, stay in touch with, maintain and fight against. All of that so you could ship megabytes of JS that ultimately just changes some text on a page. You can do all of that with vanilla JS and spare yourself the headache.

willsmith725• 3 years ago

It takes work to keep up with the latest-and-greatest in modern web frameworks. 100% agree.

But if you're already doing that, because you work in the field, or are passionate about it, then that checkbox is ticked.

I wouldn't do all that JUST to build a static portfolio, but if you already learnt and kept up with all of that stuff, then I still don't see why not use it.

rmilejczz2• 3 years ago

Strongly disagree

npm install -g vite

vite init my-react-app

npm install

npm run dev

The most popular build tools have mostly stayed the same. Some things have fallen out of fashion sure like gulp. But overall the abstractions built over complicated tools have only improved and only made it easier to get started with web dev. I’d argue it’s never been easier to start a modern statically typed react app.

PhilipRoman• 3 years ago

Unrelated note, but I had never heard of the paperfuge, thanks for teaching me something new!

evandale• 3 years ago

I've tried learning Ember, React, and Vue and have tapped out pretty early. Now I'm learning how to build a site using only vanilla JS and doing everything from scratch unless I find a reason to switch it. I think I'm making decent progress.

I even wrote my own simple test framework that shoves the results on the bottom of a page. After adding a few features I decided to switch it to Jasmine.

One thing I'm noticing is how often you need npm which I find very annoying. How is a JS library or framework anything more than a single JS file that you have to include in your page? Why is everything npm this and yarn that? Jasmine has standalone install instructions that are easy to find but I can't say the same about Jest.

osullivj• 3 years ago

Ditto on Ember, React, Vue and Elm. Was a jQuery minimalist, nut now moved on to Haxe-HTML5. Yes, it compiles Haxe to JS. But the JS it generates maps back to the Haxe very simply, and it's straightforward to debug in Chromium dev tools. There a nice declarative XML system for widget layout. It's up to you to choose how much you do declaratively, and how much in .hx code.

gochi• 3 years ago

I'm confused by this, why do you think npm is needed? It just acts a central repo, you're free to self host the JS file yourself or pump it through a CDN.

Jest is a different story, it's not a single JS file and has many dependencies. Running it globally is an easy way to reduce the need to include it per project.

sfn424• 3 years ago

People use package managers because it lets us find everything in one place, install it and keep it up to date easily.

I'd much rather do `npm i whatever` than having to hunt down a bunch of git repos and copying files over and when they're outdated having to do the same thing to update them etc.

revskill2• 3 years ago

No, React with webpack/vite is simpler than "your handcrafted static site generator".

I don't have to use any of Hugo, Jelkyll,..., because i can cook my own SSG toolkit right inside React.

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

It's a portfolio, is js really necessary?

lisasays2• 3 years ago

Javascript is the new Python in many shops.

So while one doesn't have to know JS, it will definitely get you through a lot of doors. And not knowing it, or being too stubborn to keep your skills in it polished will keep you in the doghouse.

bdcravens9• 3 years ago

Many of the comments suggest that of course you wouldn't use React for a blog.

Someone forgot to tell these folks:

https://buttercms.com/blog/how-to-create-a-blog-with-react/

https://www.sanity.io/guides/build-your-first-blog-using-rea...

(and many more)

I'm firmly in the camp that React and similar frameworks are overused. However, the point is that there's a large part of our industry that is bought-in (and in many cases, built businesses around) the concept of "React all the things" and it's encouraging to see push back.

aczerepinski• 3 years ago

I built my simple site with just Go, no libraries of any kind. Two years later it is such a dream to never ever have any dependency chores to do.

Before that I had a Phoenix site and I feel like every time I touched it (months apart) I had to update something.

Not such a big deal at work where monitoring for security vulnerabilities and updating dependencies is paid work that we make time for but I hate that kind of busy work on my own time.

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

Is it fashionable now to make a site like almost every site used to be in 2008 and wear it as a badge of honor?

P. S. Needs to be even more garish. Remember the "space pigs" theme of FastTracker II? Man, those were the days.

madeofpalk2• 3 years ago

Author made a two page static website without React. Okay? Congrats?

lisasays2• 3 years ago

Actually, yes. The conventional wisdom these days is to do everything in React (or something similarly bloated).

Because, you know, users just love seeing a bunch of grey boxes shimmer and dance on a white background for several seconds before the magic really starts to happen.

So any exercise which demonstrates that there just might be an alternative to this philosophy should be applauded.

madeofpalk2• 3 years ago

I don’t think this is the “conventional wisdom”!

whoknowsidont• 3 years ago

users just love seeing a bunch of grey boxes shimmer and dance on a white background for several seconds before the magic really starts to happen.

This has nothing to do with React, this is a placeholder rendering strategy employed by many different frameworks and languages.The rendering strategies are orthogonal to the framework.

I've written many websites entirely in React but you'd never know it, because they're all SSG. I've done hybrid SSR + SSG + placeholder/delayed load.

I could have done all of that with .NET, Elixir, etc. too because it has nothing to do with the language/framework.

codampa01314• 3 years ago

My portfolio needs to be nothing more than the HTTP equivalent of a tri-fold brochure.

My concern here is that your website _is_ your portfolio - including how you build it. It's not just the content and long narrative that's going to sell you. This new approach has switched from showing what you can do to telling what you can do.

password54321• 3 years ago

Recently tried no framework, Jekyll, Next, Astro and finally SvelteKit. The only one I liked was SvelteKit.

Not interested in reinventing the wheel (no framework), dealing with lots of boilerplate and over-complication (Next/React) or using multiple UI libraries (Astro). SvelteKit is a fine balance between simple and providing enough functionality that allows me to focus on generating content with minimal friction.

microflash• 3 years ago

I'm glad this works for them. Personal websites and portfolios are a reflection of people on their journey. If it is built with React, maybe they are learning React. If it is vanilla JS, maybe they appreciate the flavor of vanilla.

Instead of making sweeping statements about the choice of stack, I appreciate that someone took their time and built something of their own. Congrats. Next thing they should do is an accessibility audit and learn from it.

dieselgate• 3 years ago

I like using react from a cdn and rolling it out when needed - kind of the best out both world

skeptrune• 3 years ago

Pug is the most disgusting piece of sh* to ever exist.

ofrzeta• 3 years ago

About that Paperfuge analogy ... maybe I am stupid or overly skeptic but I haven't seen that paper wheel carry any samples in the video. If there was some solution to mount samples (symmetrically I'd guess) it would become quite dangerous to rotate them 120.000 rpm without any enclosure, right?

rikroots• 3 years ago

I could see a thin red tube (or maybe two half-tubes) which marked a sort of diameter line across the cardboard disc. For separating blood to get a concentration of plasmodium cells for quicker identification/diagnosis it should be enough?

antigonemerlin• 3 years ago

A company I used to work for used react to build the app, and Wix for the site.

laurels-marts• 3 years ago

Why choose pug over EJS?

When I started my first Node/Express project I picked pug too but quickly realized it was too removed from vanilla HTML I was seeing in the books/MDN and switched to Handlebars. Immediately discovered that Handlebars didn’t have a built in support for something fairly basic I needed and I either had to roll my own extension to it or look for something else so I ended up switching yet again to EJS and I’m still using it a year later today. EJS is perfect if you want vanilla HTML + vanilla JS.

dodslaser• 3 years ago

I have a nitpick re: the centrifuge example

While the paperfuge is cool and may even reach higher RPM/G than some bench top ultracentrifuges, it cannot do so consistently.

Putting "Samples were centrifuged at whatever amount of G:s yours truly could crank out on a hand built paperfuge for a solid 10 minutes" in the materials and methods section doesn't exactly scream reproducible science.

imiric• 3 years ago

A developer needs a website to prove they can build a website.

Not really. Doesn't your experience, reflected in your CV and the technical interview, already prove that? A portfolio site is nice to have, particularly if you're a designer and want to showcase your work, but it shouldn't be a requirement for a developer, frontend or otherwise.

Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

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