Hello world from the edge

I’m all for web primitives and Lindy effect in internet tech. Always went with plain vanilla HTML, Javascript, CSS, everything in a single index.html file.

But the guiding principle had always been productivity, not how stable the tech is. It’s not about being fundamentalist with tech choices. No dogma. The stability is just a proxy to less time spent updating dependencies, fixing broken code, and thus, higher productivity.

Like how, despite preferring plain CSS, late last year I finally hopped on to the Tailwind train because of my freelance gig, and man does it make me more productive! By not having to scroll up and down or toggle files to view CSS changes, I save much time and headspace.

Recently, the latest addition to the tech stack is edge functions. Just added my first Netlify edge function:

I used it to access a token in a more secure way than to expose it on client side. Best part - no need for Node.js! I thought I’ll never touch serverless due to having to deal with Node.js, but Netlify allows you to not have to npm install. They use Deno in the backend, so that I don’t have to wrangle with Node. And all I need is to just write plain Javascript in an edge-functions file! Now I can use edge functions for secure requests even while using static HTML sites, and no need to set up servers for tiny tasks. It’s saving me so much time now.

So updates to my tech stack with some fancy new tech:

HTML
Tailwind, CSS
Javascript
Edge functions

Vanilla, but with rainbow sprinkles.