For many years now I've blogged on and off at laceysnr.com, primarily around the Salesforce development ecosystem, but ocassionally on other more general programming topics too. I may move some of those posts here at some point, but probably not. I want this site to be a place where I can write about more generic programming interests, as well as make a home for my projects. For the latter it's less about showing them off, and more about making me feel more accountable for them so that I might actually get more done.
The speed of websites and the internet in general has been something that's annoyed me for some time now, in fact, the general wastage involved in modern computing in general annoys me. We have crazy powerful machines these days, that are constantly pushing extreme amounts of data (think about updating a 4k monitor, 60 times a second, just to read some text), but we take them for granted. Abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions mean that so much code is further from the metal than it's ever been, and that's a shame. It's a fact that many text editors on my desktop PC are slower to respond to the keyboard than my 1982 Atari 800XL, or my mid-90's DOS machine. Yes, those machines aren't doing anything else and my PC is doing all sorts, but the most important thing a computer does is react to the user, and when it feels like there's a barrier in the way of that interaction, it's not a good thing. Lots of people have written on this topic, talking about how their machines that are only a few years old can barely scroll a web page, and quite rightly in response they've created very lightweight websites. I think that's a good thing, and I want to do that, but I also want to leverage modern technologies as well.
The upshot? Well I'm going for simple content, and generating everything through Eleventy because I want to write quickly in markdown and have the computer do the boring repetitive stuff for me (which is what they're built for). I scouted around for a few days, and while I believe the Eleventy docs could be improved a little for those getting to grasps with it, it definitely felt like the right fit after trying out most of the big names in static site generation.
I'm not going completely spartan though - I've embraced/absued CSS to generate the background that's currently on the site. Will this stay? I honestly don't know right now, I'll see how it performs. But a hunch tells me this is the kind of thing handled once by the browser on page load and then I'm hoping dealt with in a smart way, but assumptions are not great things to make. Have I got any JavaScript running right now? No, but that's not to say I never will, but if I do add it I want to make it work nicely on old machines too, so already I need to find a way to deal with the CSS I've written. Perhaps a dedicated sub-domain will be the key: retro.mattlacey.com or something along those lines.
If you've read this for some reason, then I thank you, and hopefully there'll be more interesting content to read soon.