This is the first post on my website. I built this blog to share my thoughts and projects that matter to me. Mainly, I'd like to post about Java, performance engineering, databases, and distributed systems.

The website

My prevous blog was built using Hugo. This is a nice static site generator that neetly integrates into modern web development, has nice themes and overall really fast. Also, it’s the most popular static site generator, so why not use it?

A blog is a very simple website. There's no moving parts or live updates, mostly static data. You don't need to update a blog that often.

One alternative that really caught my attention was Plain Vanila Web. It’s modern approach to build website with no dependencies and build steps needed. And it’s powered by modern web standarts (such as Web Components).

The first thing caught my attention was how fast development loop is. For development I use VS Code with Live Preview plugin. Any change I do for the website is immediately visible in Live Preview.

One more thing, the build step is integrated in the browser! For adding new post I need to go to /blog/generator.html and generate new RSS Atom feed and Blog index.

Deployment

Since the website has no build step, it’s really easy to do a deployment. I'm using Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Previously my Hugo blog required build step in Cloudflare Pages. With new approach, the build and deploy steps take 20 seconds!