Some tech opinions as of recent:
With all my musings I always come back to the very often suggestion that āthe best stack is the stack you know the bestā, that is, just use what youāre most proficient in and ājust buildā. Of course, me being me, I decide not to stick to this. I probably have used Vue most in the last 3 months or so, and probably know it best. But I just donāt want to use it anymore. Reasons being is that itās a heavy SPA framework and itās heavily tied to VSCode. Recently Iāve been trying to move over to using Helix as much as possible, and Vue being a non-editor agnostic framework, has made it less appealing to me. Sure, setup for Vue in Helix is doable but it kind of goes against my initial reason for investing time into Helix, and that is that I barely touch the configuration. Vueās LSP setup is super finicky and actually just awful to set up in anything other than VSCode. So I donāt want to use it anymore.
Iāve been trying to explore what other things there are out there. I donāt have much interest anymore in touching things like React, Svelte, Solid, Qwik, etc as they are just kind of the same to me. I am looking for things closer to vanilla JavaScript. Why not just vanilla JavaScript? Well, I do try to use it but often find myself struggling with the pain points that the above frameworks do solve. So ideally, something lightweight on top of JS, maybe JQuery? Iāve used it once before and to be frank was a very nice experience. I guess this comes down to what Iām building these days. Most of what I am buildingā¦Iām not sure if a framework is justifiable. Iām also progressively believing most of whatās built online really does not need to reach for a framework, in part thanks (or not thanks) to Alex Russelās notes (hatred?) towards (JS) frameworks.
I briefly touched VanJS, a āultraā lightweight JS library. It seems really good actually! And I like that itās no build tool based. Iām starting to image a new stack of tools that I actually like and can continue building with.
That then brings me to OpenProps. Itās a CSS ālibraryā that just basically provides tons of variables and a healthy CSS reset. The standard defaults it provides is like Tailwind, which you can just build off. I love this because while I kind of understand how nice Tailwind can be, I often find myself just absolutely hating the markup. Itās awful to read and the more complex CSS gets the more awkward it gets. Any type of custom animation ends up being written as normal CSS anyways, and I personally really, really dislike conditional class rendering with Tailwind. Itās hard for me to understand. Modern CSS is so powerful too nowadays, I wonder why we restrict ourselves to doing everything in strings. And on that note, one thing I like about modern CSS is nesting, which I think helps with readability of the styles tremendously.