Essays

When Trongate v1 was released, I made a bold promise: v1 forever. That promise reflected a commitment to stability in an industry obsessed with constant change.

I installed Zed last week. For those who don't know, Zed is the new editor from the people who built Atom. Same vision - a beautiful, thoughtful coding environment - but this time built in Rust, so it actually runs fast. Atom was always gorgeous but sluggish. Zed fixed that.

Last night I posted a tutorial on YouTube: how to build a task manager with Native PHP. A year ago, this would have been a five-minute code generator demo. Last night's version ran over an hour - every line written by hand.

Trongate v1 prevented URL invocation through the use of an "underscore-first" method naming convention. The code was good. It worked. We had a good thing going. When building Trongate v2, the decision was made to ditch it. The reasons for getting rid of this functionality may surprise you, but it demonstrates some of the philosophies that separate Trongate v2 from Trongate v1.

If you're expecting Trongate v2 to dazzle you with a long list of shiny new features, lower your expectations. This is not a story about adding more. It is a story about removing what was never essential in the first place - and why doing so matters more today than ever before.

Let us address the elephant in the room. When developers hear the phrase lightweight framework, many instinctively translate it as toy project or learning tool. This reflexive assumption has cost the industry countless hours of unnecessary complexity and significant operational overhead.