Jeffrey Yasskin
My 9yo has set themself the task of building a website to take orders of paper crafts from their classmates. What tech stack would y'all use?
Feb 27 at 3:05amWeb
Show threadNicFeb 27
@jyasskin 11ty!! 9 year olds don't have time to futz around with broken dependencies 😂
Show threadJeffrey YasskinFeb 27
@NicMakesStuff Interesting that you and @wilander went that way. To take orders (probably just item/classmate-name pairs; "payment" will be handled in person), I thought we'd want some server-side execution, and a small database, and I haven't seen 11ty be able to do that. Are you thinking of a different way to take orders?
Show threadNicFeb 27

@jyasskin
Interesting! I think it depends on what they want to get out of the project. In my head, the purpose of this was to learn the basics of web tech (HTML/CSS/JS).

Depending on how complicated you want it to be, I'd likely just get them set up with the free plan of something like Formspree (https://formspree.io/plans) that will give them a form that sends to an email. The next tier up in complexity would probably be something like a Cloudflare function!

Formspree

Show threadJeffrey YasskinFeb 27
@NicMakesStuff Yeah, the need to take orders is definitely a wrinkle. And they didn't want it to be just an email, so that their collaborators could also see what the orders are. I'm leaning towards Astro, which can deploy to Cloudflare, and maybe its storage is compatible with astro:db...
Show threadNicFeb 27
@jyasskin I have a tiny hobby project on Astro with Turso, which gives you a GUI for a SQLite database. If you want to spend less time on the astro:db set up, it could be worth a shot!
Show threadwilanderFeb 27
@jyasskin Eleventy (https://www.11ty.dev) and then an HTML form post to a payment provider if actual money is involved. Zero tracking. 👍🏼
Eleventy is a simpler static site generator

Eleventy is a simpler static site generator.

Eleventy
Show threadBen KellyFeb 27
@jyasskin I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I set my 11yo and 13yo up with Claude code pro sub. It's helping them build, but also teaching them how to do it themselves.
Show threadJeffrey YasskinFeb 27
@ben I debated going the AI route, but I decided to encourage them to be careful with the order data.
Show threadBen KellyFeb 27
@jyasskin Yea, my kids are just doing learning projects and not doing anything production related. And the other risks of AI with kids is real... Just trying to figure out how to help them as everything changes over the next few years.
Show threadsayrerFeb 28
@jyasskin Shopify
Show threadJeffrey YasskinFeb 28
@sayrer If we were taking actual money, I'd try them, but they're fulfilling orders in person.
Show threadsayrerFeb 28
@jyasskin oh, then, Astro on Cloudflare. I just did this for someone's simple site. This lets you keep a private repo in Github and it's all free. You get at least 98-99% on pagespeed without doing any work to optimize it.