theokrueger.dev - Micro Listing

Astro is mediocre

2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

One web framework I've seen touted about is Astro, which is a server-side-rendered web framework that integrates with a ton of component libraries. There's a lot of hype around it due to immense flexibility and high speed. After playing around with it for a bit, its fine but nothing to write home about. I'd used it over React in a heartbeat, but that's like saying "I'd vote for xyz over Adolf Hitler in a heartbeat!". (To remove any ambiguity in this statement, React is like Hitler).

Its fast as far as JS-based engines go. That is -- it's slow. Wow! Its faster than Wordpress! That's not a high bar.

I ended up writing a lot about the qualms I have with Astro, but it turns out everything on that list is exhibited by literally every other framework. Astro solves no new problems and is just another flavour of the month, in a sense.

Feeling: normal

It's Vibeslop

2026-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

There's not much I like more than automation, yet there's not much I like less than loss of control.

Vibecoding, in its current state, is the worst of both worlds. The automation is unreliable, and the control is impossible. I've been forcing myself to choke down using agentic coding just for the experience, to get a better understanding of the landscape, etc.

I made two pretty bad projects with it. They have zero taste. They barely work. I don't understand the code. And I barely even consider them my own projects.

Models are really stupid in the dumbest ways. It took far too long to center a div because something about the context had it utterly convinced that it WAS centered, without being able to realise that it was overflowing. It spit out verbose documentation that is unreadable to anything but other chatbots. It wrote ostensibly bad code trying to shoehorn it's own design patterns into the obvious structure of the codebase. It hardcodes harder than a freshman in Data Structures.

Even the models that cost money (real money, and not just pennies!) struggle with bad form. Will it get better? Probably. Will the need for a competent leader ever go away? Not at all.

You, dear hypothetical reader, can stay happy knowing AI was not used for anything on this site. My promise to you is that this site is wholly mine.

Feeling: Unhappy

Merged PR

2026-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Made a tiny documentation PR to Zola (this site's SSG) regarding the migration to Tera v2. It was such a small change that I didn't even bother running CI on it, so of course the entire build failed.

Unfortunately, the change was merged within 2 minutes of submitting it, so I did not have a chance to rectify it in that same PR.

"Sir, a second PR has hit the repo."

Feeling: Ashamed

Great Migration

2026-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Zola 0.23 is out, so I had to migrate my site to it. They have breaking changes versus 0.22, why is it not version 1.something? Oh, well its not at 1.0 so its clearly prebeta alpha whatever garbage and they aren't just allowed to make breaking changes, they NEED to because its 1) fun and 2) easy.

At least I saw this coming, but man is it annoying. They didn't even have the v1 docs available for the templating engine (Tera) for most of this site's life!

Things I did

Combined shortcodes and macros into a single system less intuitive and flexible than before
Questioned why the concat filter was removed yet still listed on their docs site
Used comments as whitespace to prevent CommonMark from inappropriately touching my components
Bashed my head against a wall
Removed references to the global state in my components. Because fuck you, who needs a global state easily accessible from shared resources? Oh, its you... Too bad! We don't support that. :(

Menial Tasks

2026-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Been working on this site pretty thoroughly recently, and the little things can be incredibly annoying!!!!!!

Take the badge section: the logic is fine but the CSS rules were really annoying to troubleshoot, especially getting it working with <noscript> tags. It turns out that <noscript> can get converted to <span> in common JS-blocking extensions. Had to make some annoying modifications for the CSS to apply in those cases!

And don't get me started on getting the site to look good on mobile! I didn't even try. Flex boxes are great for avoiding clipping, but terrible for particular alignments. Lord knows how long I tinkered with CSS rules to keep things simple.

Please, fix your website's <pre>!

2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

If you have a personal blog with any preformatted text blocks (i.e. code), please make their overflow scrollable!

I've been reading YC religiously lately, and you'd think the programmers would know how to do it. They don't.

Here's a snippet for you to throw on your site:

pre {
  overflow-x: auto;
}

pre > code {
  overflow-x: auto;
}

While you're at it, just test your site on mobile at all. Its surprising how easy responsive design is these days.