I’ve spent a good chunk of this afternoon working through and tweaking and fixing some things about this website, and as much as I like 11ty, at this point I would love to be doing this work in Elm instead. A tool like elm-pages seems very appealing.

As for why: I just spend a lot of time sad about JS “sorry bro that’s undefined” stuff and templates being totally type-unaware. Even something like Gatsby + TS would probably be better here, but Elm’s rigor and top-to-bottom integration of types and rendered HTML and CSS would be a huge win for the way I build websites.

A quick sketch of an idea which I hope to test out by the end of the day: the best way to handle “responsive” routing in an Elm app — for a master-detail view where the master view isn’t visible when at a detail route on screens below a sufficient size — is to just use a port and send a message on screen size change.

Status: working on figuring out how to wire up Elm and Rust-via-WebAssembly using webpack. I’ve spent the last four years in Ember and before that I was wiring up Gulp. So this is new. 😅

Last night I threw away almost all the build config I’d been blinded by this spring while working on rewrite: webpack config, TypeScript integration, you name it. What I have left: a simple bunch of npm scripts that I can run in parallel in different terminal sessions:

{
  "scripts": {
    "clean": "rm -rf dist/*",
    "build:static": "cp static/* dist",
    "build:css": "sass --load-path=./node_modules src/style.scss dist/style.css",
    "watch:css": "sass --watch --load-path=./node_modules src/style.scss dist/style.css",
    "build:elm": "elm make src/Main.elm --output dist/app.js",
    "watch:elm": "watchexec -w src 'elm make src/Main.elm --output dist/app.js'"
  }
}

It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done just fine for the things I’m actually working on — rather than things I’ll need eventually — and that’s exacty the right balance at this point.

Next thing I’m thinking about with rewrite (while trying not to over-think): design systems! I want to build this in a scalable, maintainable way.