The fresh new website

For quite some time now my website has been using Remix and hosted on Vercel. It was built quite some time ago, and is still running on Node18. The other day I got an e-mail from Vercel saying they will remove support for Node18, so the hunt for a new stack started.

The old website is using Remix, that I could not be happier with. It gives you a really nice developer experience, with server side rendering, also hydrating into the SPA for the smooth and snappy user experience. Given that it's still using node which comes along with the ecosystem, it was time for a change.

The hunt for the tech stack went on for quite some time. I went through various languages and frameworks, trying everything from full-blown web frameworks, to system languages. In the end could not give up TypeScript and JSX.

In the end I settled for Deno. You get the familiar TypeScript language, with excellent developer experience. The ecosystem has everything, formatting, linting, compiling is all built into. The web framework of choice at the moment is fresh, it's built on the islands pattern and you're still using JSX for that familiar feel. With the previous website using React the swap was quite simple most of it was copy and paste. The styling was really easy, its still using PicoCss a really minimal classless CSS framework. It really simple for a project like this.

Now with the main reason for the change being the removal of Node18. I thought a new host would be nice. Luckily Deno comes with its own deployment platform, Dino Deploy. It has all the same features I was using from Vercel, although that was not a lot. The GitHub integration was easy to set up so you can deploy preview branches. Custom domains were set up perfectly fine, the platform walks you through everything.

So that's that the new framework hosted on Dino Deploy let's see how this goes for this foreseeable future.