So some quick background. I am not a frontend developer. A large part of my background in programming is with random tools I've made for myself and friends. I also work on game mods on occasion, and I have a discord bot I work when I'm board. The most experience I have in doing anything UI related is Windows Forms, WPF, and various TUI libraries, and my experience with these has been great, simple and straight to the point. However, something about html and css has always put me off, it just didn't click with me.

Nowadays, we have the advantage of Flexbox, which I'm able to wrap my head around a lot easier. If Flexbox wasn't a thing, I probably wouldn't be making this blog right now. I'm telling you this because I'm hoping it gives you some perspective on where I sit with website stuff, It's something I'm still learning and I doubt it will ever be my "go to" for UIs, I still much prefer TUI over writing html.

With that out of the way, we can get onto modern tooling, and I'm just going to come out and say it: There are way too many fucking options, and a lot of them I feel are over-engineered for what most people want. Seriously, the process of getting text into a browser nowadays feels more like software engineering than it does writing some hypertext with a little bit of styling. Because of that, I can actually see why people don't make their own websites anymore. If you're someone with no background knowledge into how this stuff works, and you look up how to make a website, you are bombarded with options that are just completely out of your scope. Every goddamn article will try to get you to use one of the billion javascript frameworks, or just tell you to use a serivce like WordPress and Squarespace.

Seriously, the amount of knowledge you need to have to be able to make a website with modern tooling is insane, at the bare minimum you have to learn: HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, most likely a templating language, managing packages with something like npm or yarn, and God knows what else depending on what you pick. It's this exact experience that kept me away from making my own website, I didn't want to invest the time learning something like NextJS or Vue.

So now you might be wondering "Okay so what was the point of this post?", and to be honest I'm not really sure. I just wanted to vent a little bit, because if it wasn't for static website generators like Zola I probably would have never gotten around to making my own website. It's nice that simple tools like this are still made.