The Compulsive Urge to Rewrite Everything
Description
A four-panel meme illustrating a developer's obsessive-compulsive need to rebuild a website. The top-left panel shows a person's head filled with a chaotic red scribble, with the thought bubble 'i just need to rebuild the website,' and the phrase 'rebuild the website' repeating in a circular flow diagram below. The top-right panel shows a character lying in bed, unable to sleep, thinking the same thought. The bottom-right panel uses the 'Are you winning, son?' meme format, where a character opens a door to a room filled with chaotic black scribbles and asks, 'Are u okay bro?'. A voice from the darkness replies, 'yes i just need to rebuild the website'. This meme captures the intense, all-consuming internal monologue of a developer fixated on rewriting a project due to perceived imperfections, technical debt, or the allure of new technology, portraying it as a descent into madness
Comments
41Comment deleted
The 'rebuild the website' daemon runs in the background, consumes 90% of your mental CPU, and can only be killed by a product manager with a new, even more urgent feature request
My brain: “Just rebuild the website.” Reality: that’s the same monolith we already “rebuilt” in JSP, then Rails, then Node, then serverless - proving the only truly stateless component in our stack is our collective memory of why it was a bad idea the last three times
After 15 years in the industry, I've learned that 'just a quick rebuild' is the developer equivalent of 'just one more turn' in Civilization - except instead of Gandhi nuking you, it's your own tech stack from 6 months ago that suddenly looks like COBOL
Every senior engineer has been here: that seductive whisper that 'just one more rebuild' will finally make it perfect. Spoiler alert - it won't. The real skill isn't knowing when to rebuild; it's knowing when to ship the 'good enough' version and iterate. Because that 'temporary' solution you shipped five years ago? It's still running in production, generating revenue, while your perfect rewrite exists only in your fever dreams and that abandoned Git branch
“I just need to rebuild the website” - the senior version of clearCache(): flush years of context, warm a shiny Next.js/Tailwind stack, and discover the latency was upstream in governance and content anyway
Just rebuild the website is how you end up with two production systems, the same bugs, and a migration plan called Friday
Seasoned architect's dirty secret: Facing a webpack hydration error? Just rebuild the monolith - until Kubernetes notices and pages you at 3AM
Yesss Comment deleted
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees it's me Comment deleted
you can use hot reload, bro Comment deleted
"Hmmm today I will replace pandoc with my custom parser" 25.04.25 incident Comment deleted
Why not tools from libreoffice? Comment deleted
What's point of libreoffice? I want to convert markdown-ish code to html, not an odt or whatever they use Comment deleted
are you looking for SSG like vitepress, or just want standalone html files? i don't think there is anything better than pandoc or paged.js Comment deleted
Yes, just bunch of static pages for game documentation mostly. I'm trying to do everything from scratch (at least as much as possible), so nodejs stuff is not an option. Pandoc was good enought, but I needed some custom I sertions so I just made simple bash script that do sed|sed|pandoc and adds headers/footers. At some I noticed, that pandoc sometimes does not pass raw html blocks as-is so I started making own extended markdown parser. Comment deleted
unless you are trying to learn, you should check out existing solutions, they usually support supersets of markdown like Github Markdown, less pain for you when parsing. They also have built-in headers/footers. There are good options like Hugo, Jekyll, Vitepress, Nextra, Docusaurus. Here's some more info on this: https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators Comment deleted
For docs in particular, also consider mdBook Comment deleted
>rust ok maybe js options are not that bad Comment deleted
I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean by "do everything from scratch". Doesn't pandoc itself not fit the definition? You also seem to dislike NodeJS, but then what about other programming languages and environments? I'm just so confused Comment deleted
pandoc was an external dependency. the only thing left is stunnel (because TLS specs is hard 😢) Comment deleted
What's the difference between an external and an internal dependency to you? You can invoke mdBook from console, is that not an external dependency? Comment deleted
ew, material design 2 (i'm a professional md2 hater and an md3 lover) Comment deleted
It's a sidebar and a content block, how did you even recognize that as MD2 Comment deleted
icons and paddings mostly, but honestly i just thought of mkdocs Comment deleted
I guess I just think of Material Design as a design system rather than a particular choice of padding and rounding Comment deleted
which, duh Comment deleted
it is a design system, it just has similar enough properties for my pattern recognition to trigger disgust Comment deleted
>nodejs is not an option >Nextra, Vitepress, Docusaurus thanks for links, but no. First of all because i'm already (mostly) got what i need, secondly - because extensions that i need are website-specific. I guess, it's not a problem if some generator from list supports language-agnostic scripting, but i'm not want to spend time on it. Anyway it is not a job task and i can do whatever i want. Comment deleted
why is node throwing you off so much? is there some reason apart from "js bad"? Comment deleted
And also - yes, i'm trying to learn. i just won't dive into layers of abstractions and shitton of apps inside docker inside cloud inside bla-bla-bla before i understand the basics Comment deleted
for real, but that's just the tradeoff for making web-based apps nowadays Comment deleted
Yes, that makes sense, although I don't think NodeJS in particular is high-level in any way Comment deleted
Avoiding libraries and frameworks to learn how to do things by hand is meaningful, avoiding languages isn't, really, unless we're talking about C/Rust vs JavaScript/Elixir/bash Comment deleted
Just run node then? You know, node index.js Comment deleted
You really don’t need docker or whatever. Just node Comment deleted
maybe deno or bun won't have this effect? juniors usually love to fixate on names for some reason Comment deleted
anyway, it's too late for node/bun/etc., because i don't want to rewrite server+website from c to js (or do microservice stuff to integrate with second server) Comment deleted
Same with my homelab Comment deleted
>web-based app bro it's just book in fancy computer format Comment deleted
i know, i mean the reason why node is so widespread is that it's easy to create whatever and run wherever. not that what you are doing is a web app, reading comprehension, hello Comment deleted
You'd be surprised. Good reading software supports instant navigation, full-text search, built-in typo reporting, a separate stylesheet for printing, and a simple in-browser IDE for code snippets. That's asking for a full-blown app. Comment deleted