I began programming learning the basics of HTML and how to create a barebones website using HTML5 elements such as video and audio including some basic CSS. I wanted to create more complex web apps such as Youtube, Netflix, Github and so on. I then looked up the best programming languages for this and found JS to be the top result. I then read a book on Javascript although I can’t quite remember the name, after reading this book I still couldn’t understand why I wasn’t sure how to create a full blown website.
Tutorial Hell
I then looked up the best way to create a website, React sounded like the best option as it was the most widely used and would provide the most amount of resources for me to learn from because of the very large community surrounding it. I then watched tutorial after tutorial on how to create a website using React and then eventually NextJS believing I was understanding what I was watching and making sense of everything; yet everytime I attempted to start a Next project I had no idea where to even begin. So what was the answer to my lack of understanding? You guessed it another tutorial!
I then realized tutorials serve not to teach you programming but to help you understand how you might go about beginning a project and working through certain problems. After realizing this I decided to make my own project without a tutorial or atleast not copying the exact code found in a tutorial. Instead of immediately reaching for a tutorial when I was stuck I decided to reach for documenation and then StackOverflow when I really hit a brick wall. This turned out to be the best decision I could have made throughout my developer journey. I made a Netflix clone and learned a lot about cloud hosting with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and system design. I then wondered what it would be like to work with someone on a project, for the next couple of weeks I joined countless Discord servers in hopes of working with someone.
I love new technologies
It wasn’t until my third week of searching Elijah finally responded to my message to build a project together. For the next month we worked on GorillaChat, a Twitter clone built with Bun, Drizzle ORM and HTMX. As the great Primagen once said,
Move fast Break things
Any new technology that got me excited about programming would immediately be on my to-do list of things to try. However, I yearn for simplicity in programming and NodeJS is not always so simple. All of the packages required for a simple project can become cumbersome to manage even for a small team. After working on Gorillachat I found Go a simple, compiled, statically typed programming language with almost everything you need build into the language so no need to import 100 dependencies for every project.
Personal Website
My website was initially written in Golang at first it was awesome I love HTMX, it was a breath of fresh air after dealing with React for so long. While I don’t particularly love React I do love the idea of JSX to me it’s the simplest templating language there is. So when developing with go I wanted a JSX like experience and Templ was the perfect answer to that.
At first I was loving Go it was everything it was cracked up to be, insanely fast build times, great type safety, what wasn’t to love. Then I quickly ran into some problems, in frameworks such as NextJS or Astro there is a concept of file-based routing in which a file in a specific directory corresponds to a page in your project. This in my opinion makes for cleaner project structure, Templ has no concept of this and instead has all of your files inside of one directory. While I may be wrong about this I simply couldn’t find a way to split my files up into seperate directories and found other people on StackOverflow running into the same problem.
Images suck, especially in Go having to manually resize every image I used to account for every screen size sucks. Images are a vital part of the web as they allow users to quickly scan the page to find what they’re looking for. Which is why frameworks such as Astro or NextJS have an Image component that uses sharp under the hood to automatically optimizes images to improve page load performance. Go has no concept of this and instead you must manually resize your images the old fashioned way (I have not found another way.)
Image optimization isn’t the only feature which Go seemed to lack trivial things such as automatic Sitemap generation seemed to be missing. On top of this it was just a pain to deploy to Lambda, I know I could’ve containerized the project and deployed it like that but instead I deployed the project directly to Lambda. While admittedly this isn’t that much easier in node because deploying to Lambda at all is a pain. It was just unnecessarily annoying.
The GOAT
I’ve had my eye on Astro for a while, it seemed like the perfect framework the islands architecture allows you to reap the benefits of every frontend framework with almost none of the downsides. For whatever reason I never got around to learning it until I got tired of Go. Then I gave it a try and it is everything I thought it would be. Astro has almost every feature you could ever need Sitemap generation, Image Optimization, Insanely easy deployment. On top of this Astro has a huge emphasis on optimization; automatically bundling and minifying inline script tags, and font optimization significantly increase performance. After porting my project over from Golang I immediately saw the difference in bundle size, page load time and network requests.
Go is still great
Even though Go sucks for fullstack development I still do love it, it’s perfect for API development and lower level programming languages should be used when performance matters. You may also be asking why not use Go on the backend and something like Solid or Vite on the frontend? To which I say as a one man army it’s much easier to have one project and one source of truth which I can answer to. Having to open an entirely new project when I make changes to the frontend is annoying, I would much rather have all my code in one place and be able to make any changes I need within this one project. Go is great it’s just not for me, atleast at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. Even if you don’t end up liking it that’s just one more tool under your belt and it’s always better to have to many than to little of those.