A non-trivial website that has no back end

This feels like it's playing games with words a lot. What they've built here is a service which is perfectly cacheable: the same content is served to every user, and can be precomputed in advance. This allows them to run their page generation code in a batch generator instead of during processing of the http query.

It's certainly a very good idea to serve as much of your content from cache as is possible, and I don't think anybody would be surprised by that statement. However, they still have the same amount of page generation code, they're just running it at a different time. I'm not sure I'd call that "no back end". I'd call it an interesting choice of tradeoffs to optimise query latency.

This is a good post. It would be an even better post if the first sentence were removed.

This website has a back-end, imo. It has crawlers, indexers, jobs, etc. Really the only thing it doesn't have is an api, a monolithic request handler, or a database. Well they don't show a db but they probably have at least a list of sites to crawl. Also worth pointing out that, unless they are doing geolocation or otherwise trying to pin down what a valid request is for a specific IP, then someone should theoretically be able to extract the entire dataset as static files.

Lastly I agree with the other poster who found the first sentence disagreeable. I am not offended, but it just seemed out of place in a semi-smarmy way.