This minimalist static site generator pattern is only for JavaScript developers who want something small, fast, flexible, and comprehensible

miksovsky.com

Jan Miksovsky, creator of Web Origami, tries building a basic static site generator by hand.

His takeaways?

First, and most importantly

This was pretty fun.

Simplicity = velocity

It was easy to keep the entire process in my head, so I made steady progress the whole time. I don’t think I hit a single real roadblock or had to backtrack.

Bugs were trivial

because I was working with plain objects and functions, the bugs were easy to locate, diagnose, and fix.

Experience gained is reusable

There were a very few cases where I had to look up anything. In checking the Node.js docs, I did learn about the fs.rm() function, a call I’d somehow overlooked before which removes both files and folders. I’ll now be able to apply that new knowledge in future projects instead of having invested in a niche API I might never use again.

Source code size

He did this same project earlier with Astro and compares the size of the source code:

And then once you factor in dependencies (node_modules):

Both produce the exact same output.

Understandable

Oh, and the best part of this SSG he made:

any intermediate or better JavaScript programmer can read and understand it — including future me!