Captain's Log: Stardate 78001.1

Today I found myself wondering why I was even using Python at all for the website. I like Python, it's nice and simple and I'm written a lot of it, but every web framework in Python just makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

I figured I should look at other options, and after checking out React and next.js, it seemed like it might be a lot nicer than Python. For one, all the code on server/client would be in the same language, but also it seems like the node.js folks have really figured out how to do HTML rendering in a nice way.

I went ahead and spun up a next.js project, and it took probably 2-3 hours to port over all the Python code I had written, and it is IMMENSELY better. React components are just by far the best way I've seen to deduplicate code in HTML templates, and in general, JSX absolutely destroys anything that Python has to offer. There is something called "Python JSX" and, like other Python web stuff, it made me slightly sick to my stomach.

Anyway, I went ahead and just totally replaced the new website with next.js and I'm very happy now. I love how I basically just committed the changes and Railway.app magically started serving them. It automatically figured out that the service had moved from Python to node.js. This makes Google Cloud Run look so, so bad.