I wanted to try out Vite and a few related plugins for generating psuedo-static MDX sites, so I decided to rebuild this blog that I never post on. As an example entry, I chose to re-implement Traffic Jam in React.
A quick recap of the rules: Players are allowed to move forward into an empty spot or jump over a person directly in front of them, provided the two persons are facing each other and the spot behind the person is empty. Players cannot move backwards. You win by moving all pieces to the opposite side.
So, how was it?
The setup was a little more annoying than expected. I think it’s a little tough to statically render MDX (since it can’t fully flatten to just HTML), and the combination of vite-plugin-pages and the Rollup plugin for MDX required some custom glue code.
For the most part, hot reloading works, but I did have to manually refresh the page sometimes, which is always frustrating. Tailwind is a joy to use, and it’s nice to author posts in Neovim (versus a previous iteration of my blog that had an in-page editor). The autosolver in React required a bit of annoying logic to manage state in a reducer, but was mostly straightfoward.