HTMX has me yearning for simpler times

I’ve been really into serverless recently. Specifically, I’ve been running the T3 stack on Vercel. There are several reasons:

1. I can bootstrap and deploy an app with full stack type safety, db, and auth in under 30 minutes.
2. I have a tendency to rent a server, abandon the project, and forget to cancel. Meanwhile, most serverless providers have generous free tiers.
3. I think it encourages a more decoupled architecture, which is just more maintainable in the long run.

That said, I’m tired of the patterns React encourages. I’m tired of the fact that it requires so much glue code to get things to work inside its model. I’m tired of prop drilling. I’m tired of the hype beast cycle. I’m tired of build steps and weird edge cases with server side rendering and shitty code maps. Now everyone’s talking about server functions and I’m just looking to get off the hype train. I’m tired of running projects from last year and being inundated with security warnings and having upgrades always cascade giant failures for inscrutable reasons.

Now, having used HTMX a bit and seen that their own repo is literally a 3k line vanilla JavaScript file with zero dependencies, it’s making me remember how much less tooling was required to throw together a simple website when I first started. You put a file in a directory. People would request the file. They would get the file, byte-per-byte.

I’m not saying I’m wanting to return to monke and just run LAMP on bare metal. I remember all the bullshit that came with that, too. But I really feel like there’s a middle ground to be had where all this modern deploy tooling can be used without 20 layers of abstraction. And without sacrificing type safety. It really feels more achievable than it’s been in a while, to build projects that don’t turn to mud after a couple years, but also don’t big you down and get in your way while you’re trying to iterate on ideas.