The project is up at: https://f1teams.sadev.co.za/
Yesterday was a public/bank holiday in South Africa, and that it gave me a chance to try to build something green fields in a day… but I also wanted to push some skills by doing some more work with Deno. Initially thought about building with Next, but I use that often… so thought I would try Fresh (the framework from Deno) and that naturally led to using Deploy, the hosting that Deno also offers.
But what to build? How about a simple website which shows the evolution of Formula 1 teams in time for the Grand Prix this weekend, so I can see what each team was called over time.
Building with Deno, was, as always, painless - native TypeScript support and the full tool chain was great. Only issue I had was that I want trailing commas on my JSONC data… but the formatter won’t let that be (so very minor). Fresh was uneventful… honestly, if you know Next, getting up and running takes so little extra time and the structuring makes so much sense. Deploy was an absolute highlight though - an amazingly easy to deploy from GitHub service with very generous free tier. I am now thinking of how many ways I can make use of that.
From start to finish, it took about a half day… and this is using new technologies - this is an amazing stack for quick and professional development.
Two other different aspects I used:
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When I started I hadn’t planned on using Deploy, which has a free KV available and likely if I wouldn’t use that if I had planned to use Deploy… but since I didn’t I went with a static JSONC file and parsed it with JSONC-Parser. I absolutely love JSONC more than pure JSON… and the sooner we all move to it, the better.
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I used no component library…. everything is “handcrafted” HTML and CSS. Not even something like SASS… I still think there is a use for component libraries in bigger systems, but modern HTML & CSS is so powerful that it is just wonderful to keep the size down (the whole website is 100Kb)