Posted by bundie 13 hours ago
page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes.
all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page.
All my projects are server rendered with jinja/minijinja, bootstrap, jQuery, and htmx when I need a little bit of SPA behavior on forms.
No builds, just static <script src= tags. Very fast and easy. I'll never recommend anything else.
On hobby projects same script approach without any kind of build step.
I also have experimented with HTMX and Django, and that seems to be a nice combination.
Everything is AJAX again.
There are many conditions under which the hot reload just straight up crashes out regularly.
For the curious, google's current homepage is a 200kb payload all in, or about 50 times smaller.
I did an optimization pass for a client once where I got rid of a ton of the sprites but didn't have the energy to redo it all, so it just had huge sections that were blank.
Super snappy loading afterwards though.
There might be more irony in saying it's stylized pixels without realizing that the style of the image can't be replicated with blocks of the same size but I dunno, I'm not Alanis Morissette
Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.
It's way way way way easier managing a basic VPS that can be highly performant for your needs. If this was 2010, I'd agree with you but tooling and practices have gotten so much better over the last decade (especially the last 5 years).
I can see though that today's AI models could eventually replace the human in the loop and truly automatically fix every possible situation.
It provides such things as:
```
import { Debouncer } from '@tanstack/pacer' // class
const debouncer = new Debouncer(fn, options)
debouncer.maybeExecute(args) // execute the debounced function
debouncer.cancel() // cancel the debounced function
debouncer.flush() // flush the debounced function
```
Why? Just why do you need to install some "framwork" for implement debouncing? Isn't this sort of absurdism the reason why the node ecosystem is so insecure and vulnerable in the first place? Just write a simple debouncer using vanilla js...
Many of my customers insists on using Next.js or similar but when I browse their website I don't get the point. They are downloading and executing megabytes of JS while in-page interactions tends to be limited to few basic stuff. Never seen one of their project requiring offline mode. Maybe that's being able to easily replace a [FRAMEWORK] dev with another.
Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?
TanStack just has a nicer mental model overall and works great with TanStack query for cache I validation and stuff like that.
Remix was promising but there was so much ceremony in registering API routes and stuff. Tanstack just lets you define server functions arbitrarily with no ceremony.
Might be worth a spike and some tokens to ask Claude Code to migrate and test the build time and ergonomics.
We also recently cut our build times in half moving from Webpack to Turbopack on production builds after jumping to NextJS 16. We'd already been using Turbopack in development for a while which yielded massive DX improvements related to performance. Production build times will drop further once Turbopack production build caching is stable.
Webpack -> Turbopack is the smart initial migration. I'd bet Railway went straight from Webpack -> Vite not realising that their real gains sat with the build tooling, not NextJS vs Tanstack.
[0]: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/ai-agents#how-it-works
At times I would see people daily asking for help with their broken Tailwind setups, and almost always it was them trying to use Tailwind v4 the v3 way because some AI told them so.
*I know this is just build time, so this is different then their deployement time
At DollarDeploy we building it also in containers but every build get 4GB/2CPU so it is quite fast but not as fast as Vercel.
