There’s a peculiar frustration familiar to anyone who’s worked with spectroscopic techniques like EPR or NMR: the hunt for isotopic data. You need both the spin and natural abundance of every isotope for an element, but these critical numbers are scattered across PDFs, paper tables, or, even worse, different websites. It takes minutes to look them up! My programmer heart couldn’t bear such inefficiency.

For years, I dodged React like the plague. In fact, I avoided JavaScript altogether, even in web-related tasks. Take static site generators, for example. For my old chemistry blog, I experimented with a variety of tools, year by year: Pelican, Jekyll, Hugo, Grav... In the end, I settled on Zola. Fast, robust, no JS needed, perfect for CI/CD workflows. Just prerendered HTML and sprinkle scripts for flair (e.g. comments, a masonry in the home page ecc.).