Choose boring technology

When choosing your stack, it’s wise to rely on stable and proven technologies. For this website, that means:

• Node.js + Express

• Handlebars

• Bulma CSS

You could argue whether Bulma truly belongs in the “stable and proven” category, but the first two certainly do. These choices won’t impress many people in 2025 — and that’s perfectly fine. The goal isn’t to chase trends, but to make it easy to build a solid product.

But what does “solid” actually mean?

A solid product isn’t defined by trendy technology, but by how well it holds up over time. It should be performant, reliable, maintainable, and secure, with a level of simplicity that makes it easy to understand and evolve. In the end, longevity beats novelty, and boring, proven tools are often what make good products possible.

For more information read https://boringtechnology.club/

Store and serve

As we read in the previous article, PostgreSQL is my database of choice. That isn’t just because I prefer Postgres over alternatives like MySQL, but because I once read an article titled “A Poor Man’s API”

That title stuck with me. To me, it captured the idea of an affordable, no-frills solution: using the database itself as a solid foundation for serving data, without all the extra layers and complexity that often come with a traditional backend.

This idea might sound familiar: as Supabase — a well-known data store-and-serve platform — is essentially a curated stack built around PostgREST. In other words, we’re running our own Supabase — just without the platform layer.

The Postgrest implementation im using is available in this repository https://github.com/boudewijn00/theridiid-postgrest

In the beginning

Long ago, I stumbled upon an application called Joplin. This was at a time when note-taking was becoming more and more popular. Obsidian was already a popular tool, but I was more charmed by Joplin: it felt simpler, it’s open source, and you can run your own Joplin Server for syncing.

And then I discovered the Joplin web clipper, which made it even more useful. It allowed me to easily store things like web links as notes in Joplin. For example, if I found something interesting on Hacker News but didn’t have time to read it right away, I could store the link in Joplin using the Web Clipper and come back to it later.

But now i have all these links stored as notes in Joplin, i can always open them with the Joplin client app but what if i want to share my notes with the rest of the world. I came up with this solution:

1. The Joplin client runs on your computer and syncs every notes thats been stored in the Joplin cloud
2. A simple CLI application retrieves all the notes from the Joplin data API
3. The notes are send to a Postgrest API (and stored in a Postgres database)

The source code for the CLI application is available at https://github.com/boudewijn00/read-joplin-store-postgrest

As you can see in the repository; one of the contributors is Aider. Somewhere in september 2025 i started to experiment with this tool. More about the way i use this as my AI coding assistant will come soon.