How I Built My Blog
In this technical retrospective (2024), @soheilpro shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 62 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 48 comments
When I read the blog was 10.000 lines of code and there was a long list of busswordesques technologies implied, I thought this was a parody.
Reading that it crashes or eat the CPU for some people, I still believe it somewhat is. It also displays very badly on my own Firefox (with very recent computer).
And I could not find a list of all posts.
I mean… My own blog is a 500 lines python script without any external dependency. It has 42 lines of CSS. And it is all contained, content included, in one git repository. It has a list of all the blog posts you can quickly scroll through. It displays the same on every single computer/browser/smartphone, even very slow connection on old hardware. (sources are here : https://sr.ht/~lioploum/ploum.net/ ↗ )
But I’m not an experienced web dev.
this is the self-destructive behaviour that's prevalent in the JS ecosystem.
say a newbie wants to develop a website or web app and they run into this. The amount of tools listed is overwhelming, even for me who's been doing JS for over 7 years.
and the sad thing is JS can be pretty productive, without the merchants of complexity shilling their tools.
Express.js v5 just got released. Thanks doug & other maintainers. Yet the API has been stable for over 10 years. Vue.js even with the new composition Api - the api has been stable for a long time. & other useful node libraries like 'pg' etc.
The only recent useful thing is tailwind.
Next.js / Nest.js etc are all complex tools that are completely unnecessary and shilled by dev-tools companies
Something in the runtime JS is really slowing down the page.
Here's a demo video with scrolling after the page has loaded (really choppy) and scrolling after stopping the JS with Firefox's slow-script-detection-thingy (smooth): https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/joshwcomeau-slow-scroll_2.mp4 ↗
The code seems to enter a tight loop here whenever I'm scrolling: https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/joshwcomeau-debug-script.png ↗
I appreciate the author sharing technical details about how they build their blog. I do.
However I'd like ask the HN community here to share some examples of really simple blogs? Those that do not take building Rube Goldberg machines to publish the blogs. Perhaps those where the posts are just simple HTMLs. I'll take slapping a header and footer with some scripting or SSIs. But that's about it. Do you know any such simple examples of blogs? I think such blogs are under-appreciated and should be highlighted more often on HN.
Keep blog simple will make it's easier to generate raw idea.
I just made a new opensource project named TinyMind: https://github.com/mazzzystar/tinymind ↗
Which allows you to create your blog page in 1 minutes and share to anyone.
It's non-profitable, just for hobby and helping most people who don't want stuck in Hexo/Hugo or code.