aleidk

TLDR

Mastodon already have all the features needed for a blog while giving me the flexibility to be messy :3

https://fedi.alecodes.page/@aleidk/0194fb58-6cf0-72ed-a4e7-10a0a98c4503

Now some disclaimers:

I know you could use other bundlers like webpack, vite or any other, but using those add a lot of complexity and overhead to the project (and in some cases, duplication of files even). I felt that this task ended in the "over engineered" part of web development, I only cared about having a spec files to pull dependencies in a predictable manner and to create an optimized version of these assets for faster response times.

Another thing that made me think "there should be an easy way of doing this" is that I'm not adding a lot of frontend files, you could even say this solution is overkill. But the thing is that I always try to not repeat myself so even if I don't add any NPM packages, I'm adding some utilities that I build to reuse across my own projects, and since I'm actually working on them constantly, version them is also really important to no break compatibility, so a package manager is really useful here instead of copying realese assets everywhere.

And don't get me wrong, vite is an awesome tool to handle frontend applications, but it wasn't the right choice for this use case.

All that being said, I would be happy to be corrected if there's also another way to archive this.

I finally found how to make #frontend tooling play nice with non JS server side applications!

Bun can process HTML files and create a bundle automatically, this will also transpile/build dependencies, so you can add npm packages in a script tag for example.

So for example: with a simple bun build --watch **/*.html you can process templates from whatever template engine before initializing whatever web server you're using.

#development #webdevelopment #rust #golang

TLDR

Mastodon already have all the features needed for a blog while giving me the flexibility to be messy :3

https://fedi.alecodes.page/@aleidk/0194fb58-6cf0-72ed-a4e7-10a0a98c4503

Why blog in a mastodon account??

I have tried to redact this in different ways, with different lengths and talking about different topics, but I'll just follow my own philosophy: Keep it simple stupid!.

I have tried to create a #knowledge base multiple times and in many ways: a git repo, notion, a wiki with gollum, joplin, a blog, a personal web page, a git repo again, a digital garden, a web page and a digital garden. But I never went really far with any of those.

But to the surprise of no one, by reducing the complexity of the stuff I do, I could stick to them more easily.

On another front, a lesson learned from my experience #journaling is that I value (or to some extent need) flexibility to do stuff how I feel in the moment and do them when I feel like doing them. My #adhd brain doesn't like those "we'll do this later with a cup of coffee and some nice music", no, it wants to do it when he wants to. And why fight that?? Why go against the current?? It takes less energy and time to do it now and get it out of my mind than bug me forever until I don't want to do it anymore.

So I started asking: "do I really want to do this?", and if the answer is yes, then: "how can I do this?".

So in relation to knowledge I come to these conclusions:

• I want to store knowledge in a searchable way.
• I need to write things by hand to get them out of my head.
• I want to share my thoughts with the world.
• I need to do the above with flexibility and the least friction possible.

For that I always carry a notebook that I like to call "my thoughts journal", for the searchable part I'm developing a little index system app, and to share my thoughts there is nothing easier than social media.

This could seem like something really obvious for everyone, but I never really engaged with social media before, something always pushed me away while the social needs of having one and the algorithms pushed me back in. So I never really got the feeling of "sharing a tweet" for example.

But mastodon feels different, it actually feels like a community, it doesn't have an algorithm trying to drag me in, but I continue to come back willingly, and when I want to. It kinda reminds me of how Tumblr used to be here in Latam before it was sold to I don't remember who: a place where people can share whatever they like openly and where people interacted with one another more truthfully.

As a little side note, I always found it funny you could really tell a person who came from outside Tumblr, and tried to use it as the others mainstream social media. If they didn't adapt, they ended up leaving shortly.

And for the technical side, Mastodon already covers most of what a blog needs: post, reactions, notifications, sharing, media, comments, reachability. I just needed to set up a little fedi server to have a little more room with the character limit. I can open in whatever client I have available and be done with it.

I don't intend these posts to be thorough and well formatted, because I'm not, I'm messy, I'm dispersed and my thoughts move at a speed I can't always follow, but why fight that? Better try to get the most out of it how I can and how I'm more comfortable with :3

As someone who always tries to do things "in the right way", I totally get this feeling...

But I also think, where do we draw the line where caring starts to affect you in negatives ways?

I have a personal experience about this: a while ago I read an open letter from a blind person to web developers, in a nutshell saying something among the lines of "in a world that everyday is more connected, and where you need to go to the internet to solve some basic human needs, we depend on you, our lives is in your hands" (pardon the inaccuracy, I just remember the main idea).

As a web dev, I felt personally targeted, it is my job to create websites accessible for everyone, but not just as something I need to do, but as something I want to do.

My mom is a disabled person, and worst, is an invisible disability, I saw her go through her worst times, and saw her having to fight or resign for what it should be the bare minimum for her, because nobody cares. And I can only imagine what she had/has to go through on a daily basis as I had some injuries of similar nature to her disability, it was the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life, and I perfectly knew it was just a fraction of what she felt constantly.

So when I saw that I can make the life of some people easier by doing my job right, it felt only natural to do so, I started to learn and apply accessibility features in the applications I made, but this only went so far. I started to take more time to develop the pages by implementing features that are not visible to the main public, I started to get behind schedule and the poor management of my Project Manager didn't helped.

So in order to be able to meet the deadlines and protect myself from the increasing stress levels that started to affect my personal life, I had to start prioritizing features, and sadly, accessibility wasn't one of them.

Can you blame me for not making the web page accessible and excluding people for beign able to use it? Of course you should. Can you blame me for doing what it's best for my mental health though? Can you blame me for prioritizing me and my family over some extrangers on the internet?

It's sad that if accessibility is not a client requirement, it's not taking into account...

I still try to include accessibility whenever I can, but sadly, I cannot care about it when my mental integrity is at stake.

This is a really interesting topic, because there's no solution, there's no right or wrong answer, there's not one person at fault (well, mostly), just different points of view, different realities.

I doubt that a place like the one described in the article [where everyone cares] really exists, at least it is very hard for me to believe it exists for what I have seen where I grew and live. But I learned one thing over time: kindness is usually repaired with kindness.

Be nice to other people, be kind, be understanding, and maybe with enough people doing this, we can start caring...

https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares