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System Design in the Guestbook
(AI translated)

On motherfucking websites

/ 2 min read

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Have you heard of motherfucking websites? Nah, I don’t mean the web in general.

It’s a whole multiverse with its own sequels and spin-offs:

At first I wrote it off as the usual shitpost from yet another nerd about how “things were better back in the day”. You’ve probably run into those single-page sites that cover one specific technology or someone’s personal pet peeve:

But honestly, the deeper I went, the more I saw my favorite thing in the world: people who really know their stuff doing dumb shit.

You can treat these sites as a loose set of guidelines and standards for what a website should have. And as a reminder of what the internet is actually made of: just text being shuffled back and forth.

It even got me thinking. This blog is built on Astro. Every post is its own folder with a Markdown file and a couple of images. Sure, there’s a bit of JS here, but I almost never touch it - all credit to the author for that.

And every time a new post lands here, a pipeline runs pre-commit, and a whole Rust-powered machine churns through tons of pages just to end up with a bunch of HTML and JS files sitting behind nginx2.

What for? You could just do it all by hand. You could set up the code and markup so that writing a plain old <p> is no big deal, and call it a day.

It might even be easier for agents. Hell, Anthropic has already been pushing the idea that HTML beats Markdown.

Anyway, it’s a pretty fun corner of shitposting that I’ve been meaning to share for a while. All I ask is: don’t build sites that pull down 700 megs of JS. You probably don’t need it.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones!

Footnotes

  1. I had no idea about this conspiracy theory: hotels supposedly make their bathrooms and showers deliberately awkward so that groups of two or three are less likely to share a single room, and the doors are the poster child for it. ↩

  2. The site is actually built a bit differently right now (thanks, Timeweb Apps), but I’ve got Docker too, so moving it won’t take long. ↩