Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
It is as if the "old magic" has got lost in a sea of "cloud" and "node" and "react" and the like.
Putting files of text on a webserver, and hosting it, is so old fashioned, so ancient, that it is almost inconceivable.
@neil I think you might like this article: https://infrequently.org/2025/06/conferences-clarity-and-smokescreens/
@intrbiz Thank you!
@neil I will also say, that as a Software Engineer, I'm feeling increasingly disenfranchised by the IT industry. The whole cloud sycophants, AI cultists, obsession with more and more abstraction. Just makes me think we've further and further lost our way as an industry. With any engineering principles being sacrificed at the alter of shareholder value.
@intrbiz @neil I very much think that the concept of using computers to solve problems for people, problems not caused by computers in the first place, has been lost, drowned, shot and buried by business weenies who just use computers as a means to an end of making money, preferably massive stonking piles of money. None of the decision making of VCs and their "businesses" makes any sense seen any other way. So much of the JavaScript Industrial Complex (i read Alex too) is about building wildly inefficient systems to scale to monopoly sizes to ultimately extract rent for a 10x gain in money, but most problems where a computer can help already have suitable solutions and there isn't 10x money in it.
People have been using the great quote that "computers are a bicycle for the mind" a lot recently, and most computing problems are bicycle scale and speed not cargo ship or rocket shuttle, most business needs could be solved by simple Django crud apps or equivalent, like DBase back in the day
@intrbiz @neil
We're currently deep into the process of destroying the biosphere for the sake of "shareholder value," Chris.