#374 — Nov 4, 2026 by Evan Chen
Okay yes yes yes I'm so glad I'm not the only one that feels this way and I swear I will actually write up #364 in detail on my blog one day.
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In front of you are two personal websites, each used as a blog and to display basic contact info of the owner:
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One is a complex CMS written in PHP that requires a web server, multiple workers, a Redis cache, and a SQL database. The site also has a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets "rehydrated" client-side.
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The other is a collection of static HTML files and one or two CSS files. No JavaScript anywhere.
If you didn't know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it's actually the inverse: only few professional software engineers can "afford" to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions.
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