My Tangle with Ligiet
So, everyone was yapping about this new thing, “ligiet.” Supposedly, it was gonna change how we do… well, a bunch of stuff. I heard it was super lightweight, super fast, the next big deal for setting up quick sites or something. My old personal project site was chugging along like an old donkey, so I figured, why not give this ligiet a shot? What could go wrong, right?
First off, getting the damn thing was easy enough. Just a small download. The readme file, though, that was another story. It was all “ligiet is intuitive!” and “minimal setup!” Yeah, minimal if you’re a mind reader. I spent a good couple of hours just trying to figure out the basic configuration. It wasn’t like those old tools where you just, you know, click a few buttons or edit a clear config file. This was… different. Not in a good way, mostly.
Then I tried to actually build something with it. I wanted to just put up a simple gallery, a few pages of text. Ligiet fought me every step of the way.
- The templating system, they called it “flexible.” I called it “a puzzle designed by a madman.”
- Trying to add custom CSS? Oh boy. It felt like I was wrestling a greased pig.
- And performance? Yeah, it was light, alright. So light, it felt like half the features were missing.
It reminded me of this one time, years ago, at a small startup. We adopted this “revolutionary” new framework because the CTO read a blog post. We spent more time fighting the framework than building the actual product. We ended up rewriting the whole thing in something boring but reliable. This ligiet thing had that same vibe. All shine, no substance. Or maybe, the substance was just too hidden for a regular joe like me.
The So-Called “Simplicity”
What really got me was the community. You’d go to a forum, ask a question, and get these super cryptic answers, or someone would just say “RTFM” even though the manual was as clear as mud. It’s like, if it’s so simple, why is everyone struggling in secret? It’s like that emperor’s new clothes story, you know? Everyone’s nodding along, pretending they see the magnificent ligiet features, but we’re all just confused.
I remember trying to integrate a simple contact form. With my old system, it was a plugin, five minutes. With ligiet, I was looking at third-party libraries that hadn’t been updated in years, or suggestions to “just write your own microservice for it.” For a contact form! Are you kidding me? That’s not lightweight, that’s just shifting the work somewhere else and calling it progress.
After a week of banging my head against the wall, I just gave up. I went back to my old, clunky, but familiar setup. It might be slow, but at least I know how to make it dance. Ligiet? I uninstalled it. Maybe it’s great for some super specific, niche use case. Maybe I’m just too dumb for its “elegance.” But for me, it was just a whole lot of frustration packaged up with a trendy name.
It’s funny, these tech waves. Something new comes along, everyone jumps on it. Some things stick, sure. But a lot of them, like I suspect ligiet might be for many, end up being just another tool that promised the moon and delivered a handful of rocks. I’m sticking to what works, at least until the next “revolutionary” thing comes along that I’m foolish enough to try again. That’s just how it goes, I guess.
