Website Philosophy

Introduction

Computing has come a very long way over the recent decades, but one thing which astounds me is how incredibly inefficient things have ended up. Because performance is so high and storage so cheap, software has gotten bloated with dead code that never gets used, or worse resources that are wasted. I think the best examples are when modern software takes longer to load with hardware 100X more powerful than what existed maybe 2 decades prior

The web is one of the biggest offenders, with javascript being the culprit. Web pages load sometimes more than 10 megabytes of content just to share a simple blog article with somebody. Images are uncompressed, multiple heavy trackers are running in the background, and many features are loaded which never get used. This degrades the user experience, causes unnecessary network traffic, wastes energy, and is generally poor practice. The dirty hidden truth behind the sleek designer UI of most webpages

So my quest with this website is to prove how far things can go when the technology is kept simple.

The Tech

This website was built with Hugo and serves static files wherever possible

The stylesheet is PicoCSS, and after a shot of PurgeCSS and compression there are <10kb remaining

The analytics are done with a self-hosted instance of Plausible, which adds only 1 kb to the browser

The static content is served via a CDN which improves the loading time because everything is in a digital ocean droplet in Toronto which adds at least 100 ms to any calls to the server from Europe

Reality

I just want to make clear that this isn’t meant to be a persuasive argument for us all spending hours obsessing over small details. Businesses need to make money; it is not necessary nor the biggest issue to tackle. I hope that one day things can be as efficient as MenuetOS