I’ve been learning more about Information Science lately and I created a fun widget to visualize information content in text.

This was a fun toy to build and is useful for explaining information content to others.

How I Built It

You will notice that the tool is interactive and reactive, but those of you curious enough to peek under the hood will be shocked to see that I don’t use a single line of React or any NPM packages! Reactivity without React???? Crazy. Text heat map with tooltips and not a single imported package?? Wizardry.

To be honest, I’ve found myself enjoying programming small projects without large frameworks to be more enjoyable. I’d rather not wrestle Yarn, NPM, Webpack, and a dozen other tools just to make a little widget to scratch my creative itch. If this was a year long, team development project at a company, then yes, I would use “standard” React + TypeScript tooling.