I haven’t been writing anything in a long time. Not that ideas were lacking, but time surely was.

Hopefully I will make up the lost time, lot of topics that I would like to cover (but still a bit short on time so… crossing fingers).

One of the things I have been trying to do lately is to exit my usual SPA bubble, and try to develop a few webapps with an old fashioned server side rendering technology. And I mean old-style templating, not something cool like next.js and the like: in the end, if you have an app with just three stupid pages, why bother with a complex stack ?

The first result of this is a simple url shortening service that I made. Try it: it’s small ! It’s fast ! It works!

One the technical side, how did I do it ? Really not much more than typescript on node.js, mustache, and my trusty node-postgres for the storage. Boring ? Yes, and I like it.

More seriously, for many things this is more than enough, although you can miss a lot of the niceties that these days you give for granted (what do you mean that I have to manually copy my resource and there’s no tree shaker ?).

In particular node-postgres is a bit low-level, but with just a little bit of code on top of it you can go a long way without resorting to full fledged ORMs (which I hate every day more and more). But this deserves a post on its own…