20-Year IT Veteran Builds Side Projects With No Frameworks or Build Tools

Felipe, an IT operations professional with over two decades of experience managing infrastructure at a Costa Rica-based organization, deliberately avoids modern frameworks and build tools in his personal web projects. Drawing on his day-job philosophy of long-term maintainability, he questions every dependency by asking what happens when it breaks with no one else around to fix it. His current side project is a bookmark manager featuring a nuanced link checker that distinguishes between dead links, login-gated pages, and redirects rather than flagging errors on a single failed request. The technical stack relies on vanilla JavaScript on the frontend and PostgREST with PostgreSQL row-level security on the backend, with background tasks handled by Python scripts on cron — no custom application server included. He acknowledges real trade-offs, noting that features like drag-and-drop reordering took far longer to build by hand than they would have with a framework, but argues that platform-native web standards increasingly reduce the need for external libraries.