Why I Chose No Framework

On building with just Markdown, a tiny script, and a stylesheet.

There's a strong default in web development today: reach for a framework. Static sites get a generator, a dependency tree, a build step with a thousand transitive packages. And then the framework outgrows you.

This blog is my counterpoint. It's a single Node script, one stylesheet, one small script for the theme toggle, and a folder of Markdown files. That's the entire stack. No framework, no bundler, no package manager, no runtime.

The best tool is the one that disappears entirely — that you stop thinking about, because the thing you're making is what matters.

What the build actually does

The whole generator fits in one file. It reads the post files, parses a few lines of frontmatter, renders the Markdown, and writes static HTML into a public/ folder. Then a tiny HTTP server serves that folder. That's it.

// pseudo-code, the real thing is barely longer
const html = renderMarkdown(body);
const page = layout({ title, content: html });
fs.writeFileSync(`public/posts/${slug}.html`, page);

The advantages of this approach:

• Nothing to upgrade. When dependencies publish breaking changes, there's nothing to break here.
• Nothing to install. node build.js runs with the standard library alone.
• It still works in twenty years. The output is plain HTML and CSS, served by anything.

When you should not do this

Honesty requires the other side. If your blog needs comments, search, tags, or dozens of contributors editing at once, a generator with a community behind it is the right tool. My needs are deliberately small — write, build, publish — so my tools can be too.

The goal isn't purity. It's that the distance between thought and published should be as short as possible.

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There's real value in remembering how little software is actually needed to publish words on the internet. A text editor, a folder of files, and a server. Everything else is taste.