todotask

Change your favicon, at least make that a dot.

At first, my goal was to go pure with vanilla JavaScript and CSS, hand-coding Echo routing, authentication, secure cookies, etc., using Go libraries—and I did just that. But as a solo developer managing both backend (Go + SQLC) and frontend (vanilla JS + CSS), it became overwhelming. My co-founders had no concrete feature roadmap, throwing in whatever they thought was good, and our UI/UX designer was stuck with a buggy Marvelous app. Managing both sides while constantly adapting to shifting requirements became exhausting.

To ease the burden, I introduced Alpine.js, which helped, but the real challenge was juggling Go and TypeScript for different parts of the stack. When the team decided to revamp the site with a new Figma design, I switched to Astro after the release of Astro 2.0—it simplified frontend development and allowed me to gradually move away from Go. This wasn’t just about adopting a new language with old patterns; it was about making my workload sustainable while improving maintainability.

A month later (after three years), bad news—they ran out of funding and had no time for marketing. On top of that, I have vision problems (genetic and post-cataract surgery), making job options limited. But one thing I’ve gained from this experience is a strong grasp of frontend performance optimisation—JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, HTML, and responsive images. There are millions of poorly optimised websites that Astro could improve. At least in Singapore, where we have great internet connectivity, I can keep refining my skills.

Astro solved:

- Same codebase: Both frontend and backend with TypeScript, meaning I no longer have to write routers whenever we add a new category.

- Optimisations: Reducing JavaScript and loading JavaScript as a module for better security.

- Maintainability: Go HTML templating was harder to maintain; I prefer Astro’s JSX-like syntax.

- Performance: If I need performance, Bun can be as performant as Go, which is a bonus.

- Reusability: Lots of UI and Astro components can be reuse.

- Productive (Future): I’m waiting for Vite (Rolldown) to speed up my build times. Evan You has lots of ideas for Rolldown plugins.

- Community: Of course, an active community that is improving Astro so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, with lots of sensible features by default, including Starlight for docs. I proposed to the Echo maintainer to adopt it over Docusaurus, but I was turned down.

JavaScript (Too many to list)

TypeScript has NestJS (among others)

Elixir has Phoenix

In my experience building the site with Go (Echo) with Postgres and a vanilla frontend from scratch, I realised that maintaining my codebase as a solo developer for a medium-sized platform was challenging. At one point, it became unmaintainable, and I had to rewrite it three times. The third time? I switched to the Astro web framework, and it solved all my problems.

Go is indeed easy to get started with, but it's different when dealing with server-side rendering and not a single-page application where Go is a backend.

My thought on custom Astro components is that they provide a flexible format that can be converted into MD, HTML, JSON and other formats.

Zoho have a free plan we have been using for years for business, 5 emails, each 5 GB.

I still can see my scrollbar and scroll with inert?

I have a look at SonarSource website, their homepage looks awful.

Bad marketing header "AI you can trust".

You're going to encounter various limitations with the CMS that it was designed for. I'll say this once: if we need a complete rebuild in 2025 and beyond, the Astro web framework could be the core engine due to its unopinionated nature and support for many UI components, including the latest addition, VanJS. It's seem like a well designed to keep things as simple as possible and still open to community feedback.

Of course, you could host it on Netlify, Cloudflare, and Vercel using adapters from Astro. Although it's not a traditional CMS, it's capable of serving as the core engine that should serve well for 99% of use cases out there.

That's a problem but still cheaper than UpCloud. I do find Cloudflare pricing is more attractive for read heavy website and startup plan is useful for us.

Wow, I just saw "Hetzner goes Singapore", have been waiting for a decade.

I spent the entire time building a business network platform with Astro instead of WordPress or other web frameworks because it is exactly what I need to easily manage UI components and provide a safer JSX-like environment.

In comparison to Ruby on Rails, Django, and Laravel, Astro stands on the same level but much less learning curve.

I wanted to say, the OP home page hang my Firefox browser, probably due to issues with JavaScript regexp or React code.

Those shared on Twitter when they deployed React app and assuming I came across one of the popular site that always prompt a notification (https://www.carousell.sg) to reload the page whenever there is a new update.

How do I deal with itchiness? Having trying to wear for a few seconds, can be annoying after been wearing hearing aid for decade.

still think that your users will encounter broken links when you re-deploy a new build to production, which is common in SPAs. Have YNS solved this issue?

It's fast because your demo prefetches the listings when the mouse cursor hovers or taps, which is possible with traditional e-commerce, I dislike that kind of UX that are wasting user data usage. Is there an option to disable prefetching?

Qustar sounds nice, I would think "Exact" is what it is.

Except I could hardly find job requirements for Vue in Singapore despite You is residing here.

NextJS undefined error in the console log.

I gave up when the rounds to solve increased to 20, iirc.

When I tried to sign up for Hotmail account, the challenging step I have to solve isn't friendly for my impaired eyesight.

One of this reason, I can think of having Passkey can be a better advantage over relying on centralised account management?

Large WASM payload on your site could be optimized.

JavaScript and TypeScript are the hammer. Go as an oil lubricant. C# as a Swiss Army knife. Java as a toolbox.

Virtualization tool may help.

https://modern-fluid-typography.vercel.app/

Interesting, how about in the Passkeys scenario where you use biometrics?

Ah, if between the 2, perhaps, Astro web framwork is what I could build a small e-commerce quickly with minimal code in TypeScript, Tailwind and lots of copy and paste UI. Prior to Astro, I was spent months solving the differences codebase on frontend and backend. So anyway, we are in the same timezone.

After taking a quick look at your e-commerce site, you could simplify it further without compromising performance over personalization/technology stack if you have alternative options especially minimal codebase and CDN friendly.