---
title: "Building From First Principles"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-from-first-principles-lg99sl9hq
source_url: https://marvinh.dev/blog/building-from-first-principles/
type: article
source: "Marvin Hagemeister"
published: 2025-10-28T22:25:52.968Z
updated: 2025-10-28T22:26:16.967Z
tags: ["webdev", "javascript", "architecture"]
reading_time: 3
upvotes: 47
comments: 9
language: en
---

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# Building From First Principles

**[Marvin Hagemeister](https://daily.dev/sources/marvinh)** · 3 min read · 47 upvotes · 9 comments

## Summary

Explores the disconnect between online framework-centric discussions and offline developers who build robust, maintainable applications using vanilla JavaScript and minimal tooling. Emphasizes how focusing on first principles—understanding the actual problem, prioritizing user experience, and choosing the simplest path—leads to clearer, more maintainable code. Advocates for pragmatic minimalism over framework dependency, showing that effective software development doesn't require following trending tools or methodologies.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://marvinh.dev/blog/building-from-first-principles/>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@gerhardjustolsen** · 2 upvotes

> Sounds like the author has some amazing friends.
> Me and som friends are trying out a similar approach in a project for a local festival/ con.
> We ended up using Datastar and Go. I'm getting more and more convinced every day that the old frontend frameworks, React, Svelte, Vie, Angular etc was a mistake. The amount of accidental complexity they introduced is mind boggling.
> I am worried that these types of articles are just feeding my echo chamber, and I want to hear apposing views.

**@jawadalotaibi** · 0 upvotes

> nice article Marvin, it's good to think "what is the problem we wanna solve" not "what technology stack we will use" !

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---

Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#javascript](https://daily.dev/tags/javascript), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-from-first-principles-lg99sl9hq)