A Fresh Start and Rumination on Frameworks

Thursday, August 13, 2026

In spite of the last three years, here I am, once again -- the internet at my fingertips, and the debt of my development decisions out of sight and out of mind. My brief stint with React has come to an end, and not a moment too soon.

My previous blog, known hereon as datastream.page, was, to put it lightly, a fucking mess. A solid chunk of it was written before I had even graduated from high school, and absolutely none of it was any good. My ever-present naïvety led to some... interesting choices architecturally that led to my creation of one of the worst things I would ever make. For starters, it was meant to run without a database; ironic for a website literally named 'Datastream.' Oops. Besides that, my infrastructure-averseness drove me to focus on web frameworks that were easily hosted without needing to maintain the actual underlying server. Turns out, that's not a thing. Oh well.

Either way, I was, at that point, getting into web development admidst a crossroads for web technologies; in one camp, the server-side rendering frameworks, and in the other, client-side rendering libraries. There was a sense across the field that the old way of building websites, the server-side systems, was effectively dead, and client-side rendering had gotten good enough that it made more sense to serve static files and let the browser do the real work. In the fullness of time, I have now come to realize that this is stupid and has its place, but blogs and other interactive pieces of the World Wide Web are absolutely not it.