Back in 2023 when I started to learn web development for my job, I built the Rubidium to test my skills.
At that time I was using a statically generated Jekyll website and my main goal with building Rubidium was to create a dynamic version of that site. And it went so well that, the moment it worked, I replaced my Jekyll website with it.
And the post you're currently reading is still running Rubidium under the hood!
When I first built that site, it was a knockoff of the Jekyll theme I was using. But over time, as my skills improved, I also tried to improve the design and functionality of this site as much as I can.
But I was never able to perfect it, something always felt of and with the little time I had for my personal projects, I was never been able to fix and improve this site good enough.
Recently I wrote the post Ending my web developer career to declare the end of my web projects. But every time I opened this site to take a look around, it kept itching me because I always kept seeing things this website have been missing.
So I began to wait for the end of my finals because for one last time, I decided to return and fix this website, so I can leave this and all my other projects with clear conscience.
And that evening, I opened this site, took notes of everything I wanted to fix and without waiting any further started fixings things and improving this website.
I began with cleaning out the code. Most parts of this website were running on the messy code I wrote 3 years ago and it was almost impossible to work with it, so I rewrote them. I removed around 400 lines of unused and unnecessary code to make things easier.
Than I fixed the dependency hell. Package.json file was so long that it alone reached around 150 lines. I tidied up the every piece of dependency, removed unused and risky ones and updated the remaining ones so incidents like React2Shell couldn't happen again.
The biggest problem with that site was, it was slow. The back-end was fast but the front-end was so messy it ran so slow on mobile devices. I fixed that by removing unnecessary react hooks, CSS blur and rewriting client components to be server components.
After that, I redesigned the header of the site. Before that the front page and other pages had 2 completely different header elements and while one is loaded other was just there with hidden CSS tag and that was impacting performance so much. So I unified them to one, redesigned and improved header.
And finally, I added a simple pagination to the blog page to make interface much easier to navigate and make website look cleaner.
I made so many changes under the hood to make Rubidium much better and usable for others. And to be honest, the more I worked on it, more I remembered days of making this website from scratch and those were some good memories.
But as I said on my last post, days of my web developer career has came to an end and there is no point of pushing it further. So this is probably one of the last updates this project will get before it gets archived. But source code is open and it'll stay open for you guys to make this project awesome.
Thanks for reading. as always, see you in the next one!
Reply via E-mail
Thank You!
17.06.2026