This site has always made of experiments and duct tape - a tightly-coupled mixture of React components, plain javascript, build-time custom-generated Django templates, and shared SASS stylesheets. This was choreographed with a fragile gulp build script and a long list of gulp-specific dependencies which kept dying off.

No more! Django now only handles data and provides an API, while the frontend is entirely served by NextJS.

No more Django templates! No more SASS! No more gulp! No more unholy components with separate-but-mostly-equivalent html and tsx implementations which need to be maintained because sometimes they are used in Django templates and sometimes in React widgets and sometimes both on the same page. Oh my…

It’s now just React components with Tailwind and a few CSS modules for defining grids and animations. That’s it!

And the best bit? I now get to delete literally hundreds of files worth of technical debt. There’s going to be so much space for new experiments!