action-doctl VS Tailwind CSS

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider catering to developers, offering scalable virtual servers, storage solutions, networking services, and managed Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies application deployment, management, and scaling through its intuitive user interface and CLI (doctl), allowing developers to efficiently utilize cloud resources for their projects.

In this guide, we'll leverage the strengths of Neon serverless Postgres to establish a PostgREST API on DigitalOcean. With PostgREST, a PostgreSQL database is turned into a RESTful API.

A VM is the original “hosting” product of the cloud era. Over the last 20 years, VM providers have come and gone, as have enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware. Today you can do this somewhere like OVHcloud, Hetzner or DigitalOcean, which took over the “server” market from the early 2000’s. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft's Azure also offer VMs, at a less competitive price. In their case, the VMs are either a building block for other services or the value is in the ecosystem. See the section on public cloud below for more.

Every website or web application you have ever come across on the internet contains code deployed there by someone like you (or by aliens; I can't tell the extent of their involvement at this time) and for you as a web/software developer, knowing how to deploy your code to the streets of the internet via a remote server such as cloud servers is an invaluable skill to have today. There are several decent hosting services around that enable you to properly and securely host your website or web app such as Digital Ocean, Heroku, Vercel (mostly for front-end apps) and chief amongst them, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Hacktoberfest is a month long celebration during October each year. 2023 is the ten year anniversary of the event and I'm excited that something like this still runs. Hacktoberfest is spearheaded by Digital Ocean. This year, ILLA and Appwrite have joined as the presenting partners.

Next, head over to DigitalOcean’s website and click Sign Up if don’t have an account, or Login if you already have one. I choose to Sign up with GitHub

Hacktoberfest, started by DigitalOcean, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year 🥳 It is an annual event that celebrates open-source software development by having developers actively contribute to open-source projects. As of last year alone, there were over 147,000 participants.

My transitioning to MongoDB was swift and straightforward, primarily due to my prior use of the Repository pattern; I only had to update a single file. I was optimistic with that my MongoDB setup would be long-lasting. However, the unforeseen circumstances surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to my server crashing, resulted loss of the most of my data and projects. Fortunately I've since managed to recover and relocate everything I could to Digital Ocean (My referral link). So now everything is back in operation.

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).

- Staff Software Engineer ($275k/yr): https://tailwindcss.com/careers/staff-software-engineer

We're small, independent, and profitable, with a team of just 6 people doing millions in revenue, and growing sustainably every year. You'd work directly with the founders on open-source software used by millions of people.

If you like the idea of working on a small team that cares about craft and isn't trying to achieve VC scale, I think this is a pretty awesome place to do your best work.