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Post-Mortem: goldst.dev v1

None of my projects was more of a failiure than this one.

It was also the project that I consider the most important one for my personal development. Here are a few things I learned:

Colors are your friend

"Keep it simple! You don't need more than two colors to display information! If you need more, then you didn't structure it well enough." That's what I was telling me back then. And to some extent it is true, color should not be overused. But it turned out that choosing two colors is impossible, if they have to represent text, background, control elements, graphics, everything, while still looking good and supplying enough contrast. Colors have a purpose that goes beyond distraction when used responsibly.

Some designers suggest to start in graytones and color everything that needs color afterwards (forgot the source, sorry). I think this approach is quite good.

Yes, mobile is important

I had this cool desktop concept in mind and had the opinion that I'd just come up with something for mobile afterwards. The mobile thing I came up with afterwards was ugly and didn't work well.

I still don't think everything has to be built mobile-first. But it definitely shouldn't be mobile-last. Mobile screen sizes need to be considered, in one way or another, from the beginning. By having a general idea on how the website should look like on small portrait devices, it is possible to from something that will work on all devices. The other way around not so much.

The idea of low level JS is as stupid as it sounds

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.
– Agile Maifesto: Principles

I wrote the whole website in vanilla javascript. I refused to use any existing libraries. I didn't even use a bundler. I created my own linear algebra library and wrote tons of documentation that noone is ever going to read.

I believe that this stupid idea of writing everything from scratch gave me a lot of knowledge. Probably I am able to write code more intuitively now. Nevertheless, it was extremely time consuming. The theoretical performance gains are neglegible, if they even exist.

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