Going No Build

Over the last few years I've experimented with various different systems and tooling to run this tiny site.

As a constant tinkerer, I like to try new CMSs, frameworks and methodologies but never really found one that I truly enjoyed.

Out of the above, I probably liked WordPress the least but that was because I've built countless sites using it at work (and still do) and with any personal project you want to try new things, right? The beauty of using WordPress was that I knew how to achieve most things I wanted without too much trouble. Most functionality was only a Stack Overflow search away (or ChatGPT these days)

Kirby is a CMS that I have never used for commercial work, but I bought myself a license a while ago and used it to power my site. I liked how it didn't use a database and your content was committed to the repository rather than being stored in a database like WordPress. Being able to work on different branches and then push to live when I was happy was a nice feature to have coming from WordPress.

I then moved on to Laravel as we were doing a lot of projects at work at the time using Filament as a framework for admin areas and it seemed like a good fit. I enjoyed building the site with Laravel as it meant the possibilities were endless but with all that freedom came a bit of paralysis when it came to making changes or even just adding content. I was constantly trying to invent new features, and it came to the point where I spent more time tinkering with how the site worked rather than creating content for the site. Its flexibility made me feel stifled.

All of the above also had some kind of build process for the frontend assets. Whether it be Vite, NPM, grunt the list goes on. All had a node_module folder that had countless packages in there. At first this was all exciting and seemed like progress. Being able to use some kind of framework that would give you consistent rendering across a whole bunch of browsers whilst also letting you use modern techniques was great.

I must admit, it took a while to realise that a lot of front end techniques I was leaning on using frameworks was actually now available natively in CSS. I feel that my knowledge had atrophied.