The calm joy of using a vanilla tech stack

Using vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript to build Lists Kit had been super enjoyable.

Ok I confess: Maybe trying to figure out CSS without using flexbox or a library like Tailwind had been somewhat painful, but nothing as painful as having to deal with tooling, build steps, configs, dependencies, node_modules.

There’s something about using such evergreen tech that’s really assuring and calm.

I mean, HTML, CSS and Javascript do get updates. But it’s not crazy like the latest Javascript framework of the day. Very few breaking changes, if none at all. Things that worked a year ago still works today, and that’s a lot in Javascript framework land. In fact things that worked 5-10 years ago still mostly works, and that’s rare in programming.

I can code this, and feel confident the site will continue to run without a hitch even after 10 years. In fact, the risk of the hosting company that host the code shutting down is higher than the code breaking.

I want my tech stack to be like that. I want it to “just work”.

It’s wild that such a simple ask can be so hard to attain these days.

All I want for Christmas is just the calm joy of building things on the internet without constantly worrying they’ll break.

Is that too much to ask?