B⋅LAIR - Breadcat's Lair
B⋅LAIR
Bread kitty

What's dis? What's dis!

B⋅LAIR (for Breadcat's LAIR) is a custom server and application written by myself with, as its only purpose, serving this website.

It is using Actix as it's web framework, and Askama as it's template rendering engine (yay Jinja yay).

But why?

It has been used as an excuse for me to learn software development and more particularly Rust (and also JS/TS).
Originally this website was simply a Neocities website crafted with the generator Zola. But at some point, Zola's developer started to pretty intensively use LLMs to work on it but also on Tera (the "engine" behind Zola).

I wasn't happy with it at all and I wanted to use something else, something that at least could pretend to have been developed by someone who values software quality, the maintainability of its code and its users.

The most popular alternative would have been Hugo, but this project is also a giant AI-slop mess, so it was a no-go. The other alternatives I checked didn't retain my attention, either because they didn't have some features I needed or because I just didn't understand how to use them.

It pretty quickly appeared that « If you want something done right, do it yourself. » ("right" here meaning "for me" and not as "the right way"). So I started, veeery slowly, to work on a full rewrite of my website but with the low-level programming language I was already learning at this time. And some months years after, B⋅LAIR was born.

Screenshot of my previous Neocities website: Hey, this Neocities has been moved to a brand-new-absolutely-the-same website! Check it out at https://breadcat.run This neocities account will be closed very soon. To be clear, I still sincerely love this space and the websites it hosts, I just need more flexibility, notably because I'm working on my « I'm a Rust developper who rewrite everything in Rust so I decided to rewrite my whole website in Rust because of course » hobby project and… well, you guessed it, it's not gonna work at all with Neocities 😬. (Tho, the site on the new url still use Zola as static website engine, because for now I don't happen to be very good at programming.)

Was it worth it?

*Half-Life 1 announcer voice* Yes.

Honestly, if I didn't have some principles, life would have very probably been easier for me. But in the end, what do I got?

  • Competences (not going to fuck Microsoft's ass (despite the bar being insanely low) but still a little something I can be proud of)
  • A very performant custom server and website
  • That is fun to develop
  • And infinite possibilities

So yes, totally worth it. With what I'm learning today, I could do something else later, maybe even something that could be useful for some. What I'm saying is learning is always worth it and it's even better when you're having fun doing it.

I'm not saying you can't learn anything when using LLMs, I think it's wrong ultimately. But every time I use them, I feel fucking horrible, I hate the result (the result was almost always dogshit and I'm not being performative, it was really miserable) and so I barely understand why there's so many developer who cram a fuck ton of Claude Code tokens and call it a day (and of course I'm not speaking about developers forced to use them by their employer), and I'm just speaking from a "quality of work" perspective, everything else (energy usage, nasty political implications, consumer components shortages, everything that has been theft for data training, etc) are facts that makes me definitely angry with the technology.

Here's the thing: I code because I enjoy coding, figuring out how to do stuff, getting the satisfaction you get when you resolve problem, I mean, do you have ever played any puzzle game? So the less I use them, the better I feel.

So.

For now B⋅LAIR doesn't have that many features, but I'll improve it over time, it will stay a fun hobby project that help me at getting better at programming and maybe someday everything I learned will be used on a project I'll be able to do for a living. Maybe, maybe not, time will tell.