A holiday project with Deno 🦕, Fresh 🍋 , Deploy and Formula 1 🏎️
The project is up at: Yesterday was a public/bank holiday in South Africa, and that gave me a chance to try building something from scratch in a day... but I also wanted to push some skills by doing more work with Deno. Initially thought about building with Next.js, but I use that often, so thought I'd try Fresh (the framework from Deno), which naturally led to using Deploy, the hosting that Deno also offers.
What to build? How about a simple website showing 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 toolchain were great. The only issue I had was that I wanted trailing commas in my JSONC data, but the formatter wouldn't let that be (so a very minor quibble).
Fresh was uneventful—honestly, if you know Next.js, getting up and running takes little extra time, and the structuring makes so much sense.
Deploy was an absolute highlight, though—an amazingly easy deployment from GitHub service with a very generous free tier. I’m now thinking of how many ways I can make use of that.
From start to finish, it took about half a day—and this is using new technologies. This is an amazing stack for quick and professional development.
Two other different aspects I used:
When I started, I hadn’t planned on using Deploy, which has a free KV available. I likely wouldn’t have used it if I had planned ahead, but since I hadn’t, I went with a static JSONC file and parsed it with JSONC-Parser. I absolutely love JSONC over plain JSON—the sooner we all move to it, the better.
I used no component library—everything is "handcrafted" HTML and CSS. Not even something like SASS. I still think there’s a use for component libraries in bigger systems, but modern HTML & CSS are so powerful that it’s wonderful to keep the size down (the whole website is 100KB).