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Comment by bradarner | Hacker News Reader

This is why the internet is amazing!

Awe-inspiring. Beautiful.

How does the author build these pages? Looks like it is React. The entire blog must be custom built, no? Or is this built on top of an existing CMS?

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No React to be found (and good riddance). It's two vanilla JavaScript files:

https://ciechanow.ski/js/base.js

https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js

Funnily, this JavaScript would not pass through most modern job interviews.

For those of us not in the know, why not?

Inconsistent style. Once global functions (that's so 2000), once prototypes (that's so 2010). No lazy loading, no modularization, no state management. Mixing variable declarations with initializations, one "var" declaration in the code. He probably haven't heard about TypeScript, transpilation, and doesn't understand static typing. Fells like a show off. That guy is an absolute no-no.

Was going to ignore this comment until the last 2 sentences. I rarely come across sites / articles that do this good of a job at explaining something I think calling it a "show off" and saying the author is an "absolute no-no" is a bit rude and I don't agree with it either. If anything I appreciate the code as it is, it's very readable at least to me.

My comment was /s of course. JavaScript from 2000-2010 era can do wonders especially if you leverage modern APIs and enormous performance of modern browsers, instead of silting it up with transpilation, frameworks, and layers of modules. Unfortunately simplicity is signalling a beginner and amateur in enterprise working environment.

Dang my bad, I feel silly for not catching the sarcasm in hindsight. Apologies.

17.6k LOC just for one post to educate and entertain people. Beautiful.

As usual, it's not the tech.. it's the business model.

Cheers...Chrome dev tools must have tricked me.

Also nice that the author didn't minify it. Interesting to read through.

Hand crafted, artisanal JavaScript.

You definitely don't need a CMS for a blog. I'd expect most HNer blogs you see here are either html files or markdown processed/styled into html files. I bet various templating solutions are popular too, which just output html files.

IME the reasons to have one are that you want people to comment and you want other people to write posts sometimes.

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