Hello Tetractys

As I'm typing this I have no idea whether what I write will be saved when I click Save. That's what it's like building something new. But also I have to admit, I'm not even sure what the app does.

Content Management sometimes feels like it's in my DNA. When I first began building websites and apps in the 90s, we didn't really have the concept of CMS. We had FrontPage and Dreamweaver, but any time someone wanted to update copy on a live site it tended to come over via email, and then a developer would input it into the site code. Then we'd upload it to a server via FTP and ask the site owner to review and approve it. Sometimes we'd just send screenshots. It was quite an onerous process, and the results were usually not very good.

At some point, someone somewhere got the wise idea to decouple the content from the code and allow a site content editor to safely update text and other embedded media. Overall this was a fantastic idea because it meant that developers could spend their time writing code while the site owners and editors could update content any time they wanted.

For the most part, it worked. There were several CMS platforms on the web throughout the 90s--FileNet, Roxen--and by the late 90s we started to see blogging sites, like LiveJournal and Blogger, come online. In the early 2000s, WordPress was introduced, which now claims 40-60%+ of all CMS-powered websites. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are also popular consumer options, with enterprise platforms like Contentstack (where I work as a PM) taking the lead on content personalization and API-first, headless CMS at scale.

It's probably counterintuitive why then I built Tetractys to manage my personal websites, which goes in the complete opposite direction. Tetractys isn't a CMS. It doesn't have RBAC or users. It doesn't have any way to manage media or images. There's no way to extend it. There's really no real reason for anyone but me to use it.

When AI-powered code generation first made the scene, I went back to first principles and started building sites from pure HTML, CSS, PHP and JS. It was wholly unnecessary, as I have ready access to probably the best CMS on the market at work (yes, I'm heavily biased), and anyway I could build and deploy awesome stuff using AI and powering it with NodeJs. The result of that first-principles learning and work is Tectractys.

I found that I could generate any page with any content I wanted via AI, but when I did I lost consistency. Every time I wanted to generate a basic static page, the content and design would change slightly with every iteration. I wanted to simply be able to generate new designs and new words on the page, but I wanted to have control over when things changed.

The way it works is simple: A single JSON file controls all of the content, and it's all flattened into HTML templates when it's deployed. If you're familiar with static site generation, this is that, but so primative as to be laughable. Nobody should use it for anything they are worried about losing. : )

It's getting a little better with every sesh.