Do you mind sharing some? Most websites I can think of are either highly distributed (e.g. Facebook, Netflix) or their customer base is geographically limited (Yelp).
Uploading media files to (or from) developing countries with weaker internet infra often results in timeouts and dropped connections. I tried uploading a 8GB file to Singapore S3 from Florida and my connection often timed out.
I'm trying to imagine how you can deliver a fast website to users around the globe without distributed systems.
Those are all sites with 1000s of engineers, real-world use, and actual evolutionary pressure driving their features. You want to compare to essentially static sites with some light user statefulness.
This guy's site is not netflix nor facebook, nor is he 10k developers to support those architectures.
If this guy were pragmatic, a Ruby on Rails/django app in heroku would do wonders. If he wants to promote React because that's what he sells, that's a different story.
The problem is the people taking what this guy says as "the modern way to do it" and then you find the messes you find at work.
For anyone who's wondering: a repost invite is a way of getting a post into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page. If the original submission is older than a few days, we don't re-up it, but rather invite the submitter to repost it. Then it goes automatically into the pool. So yes, it's something good :)
Uploading media files to (or from) developing countries with weaker internet infra often results in timeouts and dropped connections. I tried uploading a 8GB file to Singapore S3 from Florida and my connection often timed out.
I'm trying to imagine how you can deliver a fast website to users around the globe without distributed systems.