Hacker Blog

Hacker Blog is a provocation dressed up as a Jekyll theme. In an era of CSS frameworks, bundlers, and megabyte JavaScript payloads, it asks a simple question: what is the minimum CSS needed for a blog to be readable and beautiful? The answer turns out to be almost nothing at all.

The theme uses roughly one kilobyte of CSS — not minified, just genuinely that small. The typography relies entirely on the browser’s default serif stack, which means it looks right at home on every operating system. The layout is a single-column stream of text with generous line spacing and comfortable measure. There are no fonts loaded from a CDN, no icons fetched from a third-party server, and no JavaScript parsed on page load.

The result is extraordinary performance. Hacker Blog achieves perfect 100 scores across all four Lighthouse categories — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO — without any optimisation effort. Pages load in sub-100ms on a fast connection and under a second on 3G. The theme automatically respects the prefers-color-scheme media query, so users with dark mode enabled get a dark background without any JavaScript toggle.

This is the theme for developers who believe the web is too slow, who read Jeff Atwood’s “The Best Code is No Code at All”, and who want their writing to be the only thing their readers notice.

Who is it for? Performance-obsessed developers, minimalism advocates, and writers who want their words to be the only thing on the page.