At my work we still run all our own iron. Many classes if applications will continue to be way too complex to run entirely on a mobile device. Web assembly will enable things like blender3d, Photoshop and ableton live to run within a browser it's not going to entirely wipe out the back end rather the desktop and local applications will go away.
Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
101–110 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
At my company, we have one software package it costs on average a quarter million USD to install per enterprise customer. It gets about 100,000 records added per day in some deployments. We test our migrations on those systems and have a dedicated data service which is the only thing which can touch any given customer database. We are paranoid about those systems. We also have throwaway apps like an internal time clo…
> which monitors when people show up based on their cell MAC That sounds miserable.
It's voluntary. We're all salary and a portion of our bonus is based on hours worked. When I did the occasional 100 hour week (also voluntary; I work on fun stuff) and forgot to log my hours, I would get credit for it, but there wasn't a direct metric for compensation.
We started adding in other employees in multiple departments cause they liked it better than manually tracking.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#103Personally I don't see any of that happening - client-side app development on the web is a chaotic mess with no "official" (whatever that means) way of doing things. Throw into that mix the constant reinvention thats going on (yeah can't wait to see everything get re-invented AGAIN when web-assembly comes along), for what constitute incredibly marginal gains in the UI space (the web UI was already way fast enough 5 y…
What do you think about a browser plugin that runs arbitrary .exe code via a plugin? It would have to be sandboxed, of course, but it would give you all of the benefits of a browser distribution model without having to deal with the DOM.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn't we? I can do all of that. I can write better code than the the writers of the last two applications I have inherited (admittedly my sysdamin skills are probably less than a full time sysadmin, but good enough). I guess following your analogy. If you only had a dentist and a salesperson available to do your heart surgery, who would you choose?
Well, mostly because you don't have the years of experience in doing it, pretty much that. Because most of devs live only on their laptops ('works for me' syndrome), without thinking about networking, hardware underlying, OS tuning, security and other things. That's generalization of course, and I am glad you can do it all, I'd wish to have chance working with people like you more, but the reality is that you're an u…
Devs that don't think about the environment their code runs in are bad devs. Sadly, this group seems to be large.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're correct. I was out of line by being too general. For our large scale applications we back up the database and have required down time from our customers while doing a major migration. Everything isn't always simple. But adding a check box in 90% of cases usually is.
Adding a check box in a relational database most likely involves running ALTER TABLE to introduce a new column which in most relational databases locks the table. Now lets say you are doing 15,000 requests per second on that table.... is preventing those from executing acceptable in your system? Its not in mine which is why we don't run ORM generated migrations.
I conceed. For some databases, any adjustment is clearly a major decision with potential consequences. My comment was needlessly inflammatory.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider the problems that both Lambda and Containers/PaaS solve for you: ignoring infrastructure. It's there, sure, but I don't care much about it. Now take that idea to the absolute extreme. I write code, I push it into the cloudy-cloud machine, and it's serving clients immediately.
As someone that knows how to set up a server, I found Heroku a lot more difficult to get a Django app running than on a "normal" server. And a lot more of a PITA to debug.
I had the same experience as a django novice until I started understanding how django works. Its actually a lot easier once you know some of the pieces eg. dj-database-url. I realized I had issues because I didn't understand how all the pieces fit together.
ALso.. they have a template that you can download which essentially solves all the issues. Nowadays I always start with their template. or even if I have the app written, I will download django template from heroku, and plug in my apps to it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#107Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…
"Serverless" such as AWS lambda removes the ability to take advantage of so many Computer Science principles that are integral to writing a fast backend. From one request to the next there is no CPU cache optimization, in-memory caching, and no IPC to other useful programs. Serverless has it's niche for some tasks such as responding to events, but to do any heavy lifting I'd take a handful of beefy VMs over unlimited…
PaaS vendors will optimize the hell out of their higher-value services, with dedicated and possibly customized hardware and networking.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#108WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.
The JVM is very fast.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#109Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…
This model isn't "serverless", it's PAAS. It's not much of a future. Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale. (Edit: Doesn't mean it can't be more popular though - the web is full of prototypes) "Serverless" as in AWS Lambda has very specific use cases. The people who are serving websites on Lambda or something are not only doing it wrong, they are wasting money while locking themselves in to an architecture that…
"Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale"
Can you clarify more on this.
Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?
#110WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.
That Java comment is horribly misinformed. Sure, the JVM requires more resources at a minimum that implementations in other languages, but a competent programer using the JVM will run circles around your favorite Python/JS/(insert language here) implementation.