The room is dimly lit. The air is thick with competition. A group of developers sit around a sleek, minimalist table, each armed with their laptops. Patrick Bateman, a sharply dressed full-stack developer, leans back in his chair, fingers steepled, waiting for his moment.
McDermott (smugly): Check this out, guys.
Taps his trackpad. A pristine webpage fades onto the projector screen.
McDermott: I just launched my new portfolio. Blazingly fast. Gatsby. Tailwind. Hosted on Vercel.
Van Patten: Nice. But check this out.
Clicks a link. The screen refreshes, revealing an ultra-modern, brutalist-inspired UI.
Van Patten: Pure HTML. No frameworks. Just raw, semantic code. It’s fully accessible. No JavaScript. Renders in 0.3 milliseconds.
The developers murmur. Even Bateman seems intrigued. But then, Price smirks.
Price: Impressive. But have you guys seen this?
He casually opens his laptop. The screen glows with a perfectly optimized landing page—whitespace used sparingly, gradients so subtle they whisper.
Price: Astro. Edge functions. Images served through a global CDN. Built-in dark mode toggled through the OS. LCP under 1.2 seconds.
The room is silent. Someone audibly swallows. Then, Bateman exhales, slowly. He lifts his laptop lid, revealing… the cleanest, most refined design anyone has ever seen. The kind of site that makes designers weep and backend engineers question their life choices.
Bateman (calmly): It’s Hugo.
Gasps
Bateman (calmly): Pre-built markdown. Client-side JavaScript. Instant load times. Hosted on GitHub Pages. No databases. No bloat.
(McDermott drops his coffee. Van Patten is visibly sweating. Price grips the table as if trying to steady himself in a storm. The silence is deafening. Then, someone whispers…)
Whispers: Dear God.