There's life beyond React.js

Every front-end developer has or will come to a point where they feel like the developer experience sucks. That happened to me when I was upgrading the packages on an old project. It took me two weeks to deal with all the breaking changes, and I started thinking about my back-end colleagues who never complain about npm.

So I started looking for alternatives for building simple things on the front-end, something that wouldn't require too much tooling. And eventually, I found a guy on Twitter who said he had rewritten an entire application using Stimulus. I remembered hearing that name in a conversation at work a few years ago, so I decided to check it out. I know that's not a great reason to choose a technology, but I needed some kind of criteria to narrow down the gazillion options we have today.

I chose a simple project to try out Stimulus - a login page that needed to be light, static or server-side rendered, and better than pure Vanilla. After the npm nightmare, using Stimulus made me feel refreshed and young again. It's not for every situation - like if you have a big team with a lot of complicated front-end stuff - but it felt just right for my project. You can check out my sample app here.
(Layout credit to Denis Bliznyuk)

Go check out the hello world on their website really quick: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/. Stimulus was made by the Basecamp guys and has 11.7k stars on Github. It's a really strong candidate for anyone who's tired of all the bloated front-end tooling.

If you prefer watching videos to learn faster, check out this one from Matt Swanson where he talks about when he would choose Stimulus as his framework of choice.