farthergate.com/posts/2025-06-09-an-ode-to-simplicity.md

title
An ode to simplicity

If there's one lesson that I take from developing — and, more importantly, later abandoning — Cheetah, it's this: nothing can kill a good project, or even a middling-to-mediocre project, like scope creep.

The first big mistake I made was to do everything myself. Now, this was an incredible learning experience, of course: I learned how to write functioning Rust code, for one (functioning, not clean; please mind your footing around the Rc<RefCell<HashMap<String, Rc<RefCell<ElementRegistrar>>>>>), but by everything, I mean everything. Starting with the template engine. And it wouldn't just be a normal, text-based template engine: this template engine (in one file, for those who don't value their sanity) worked on the DOM.