My experience with making a Website (with Svelte!)

What is Svelte?

Svelte is a relatively small JavaScript framework that is, in my opinion, much simpler and more sensible than frameworks such as React.

When I was setting up the project, I chose SvelteKit. As it turns out, SvelteKit is designed for applications with a backend. I didn't know that at the time, and to be honest, I'm not going to change it now. It's a miracle that everything still works.

I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of "if it works, don't touch it."

JavaScript

Let's be real: coming from C++, JavaScript is weird.

It has a bunch of quirks that don't make much sense at first, but you eventually learn to live with them. What surprised me most was how much simpler it was than I expected. I went in expecting complete chaos, but after a while it started to make sense.

Well... mostly.

HTML & CSS

HTML and CSS aren't programming languages, and they feel very different from what I'm used to.

I kind of understand HTML, but CSS just doesn't click with me. I was Googling things every three seconds trying to figure out why something wasn't aligned correctly or why a style wasn't being applied.

Eventually, after building the homepage and blog pages, I gave up trying to remember everything and started copying existing code and modifying it until it worked.

Surprisingly, that's a valid strategy.

Cloudflare

To buy the domain spatulari.com, I used Cloudflare.

I love it. Everyone loves it. (As far as I know)

The domain costs only €10.46 per year, which is honestly cheaper than I expected. Since my website is completely static, I don't need to pay for a VPS or dedicated server. Cloudflare Pages handles hosting for free.

Cloudflare also provides Email Routing, which means I don't have to pay for Google Workspace just to have a custom email address.

Now anyone can send an email to [email protected], and it simply gets forwarded to my regular inbox.

Pretty cool.

npm

npm gave me PTSD.

I don't know much about it, but lockfiles, dependency versions, and package managers in general managed to make me spend hours debugging things that should have taken five minutes.

The best part?

The fix was simply downgrading npm to match the version Cloudflare was using.

Hours of debugging.

One version mismatch.

Many people will call it "Skill Issue", but honestly, I don't care

GitHub & Deployment

As I said before, Cloudflare is fairly simple to use. And it was fairly simple to link a GitHub repo containing the website code, with cloudflare pages. My deployment, is as simple as:

git add .
git commit -m "feat: something"
git push
wait 10 seconds
Done.

Website is online with the latest changes (if build didn't fail)

What I like most is how little configuration was required. I just created a new Cloudflare Pages project, connected my GitHub repository, and Cloudflare handled the rest.
It's one of those things that feels complicated before you try it, but ends up being surprisingly straightforward.

Final thoughts

Overall, building this website was much easier than I expected.

I learned a bit of Svelte, a bit of JavaScript, a bit of CSS, and a lot about deployment, domains, and web development in general.

Would I call myself a web developer now?

Absolutely not.

But at least I have a website that works.

Thanks for stopping by.