Developer, Always Do Your Best!

Every Thursday I bring my son to the Swedish school here in Berlin. That's 1h 30min of time sitting in their lovely cafe. This website is a project born out of that.

I have owned "IceColdCode.com" for quite a while. Ages ago I had a website written in Yesod on this domain. Back then I was more than happy over just running Haskell. But it does feel wasteful to have a server generate markup on every request, in particular for something that is updated rarely. Nowadays we also have so many great tools for creating static websites, and easily accessible and cheap CDNs to serve them through.

Beyond this website being a space for my writing, it serves as a playground to try out interesting ideas for making efficient and user friendly websites. It is a little bit of a reaction against all those websites letting you download 10MB to read an article, an article such as this one.

I believe that we as software developers must innovate and become better at using the right tool for the job. We must take pride in building optimal solutions that need as little human energy, as well as electricity, as possible to get the job done. We must ask ourselves if we really need to generate a fresh response on every request. We must ask ourselves if we really need React to implement something that could be done in <100LOC VanillaJS. We must ask ourselves if we need five server instances, or if we could do with one, if we just invested a little more brain power into the problem.

For the next problem you, or I, face, let us commit to thinking it through and not offer a solution, but offer the best solution we can. Only then can we for each problem we solve contribute to our own, and our profession's, development.