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Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

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Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#121

Post by erlich »

hnuser847 wrote: post #46

I feel your pain. My career happiness peaked around 2014 or 2015, when I was writing Rails monoliths. I felt like I could focus 100% of my energy on business logic since the framework was so opinionated and the stack was simple. Things went rapidly downhill after that, once microservices, SPAs, node.js, NoSQL, and serverless computing started becoming popular. Everything just felt like a step backward. Microservices…

Spot on. Rails just let you get shit done. All we needed was a Rails for Node.js.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#122

Post by vultour »

mike31fr wrote: post #61
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #18

no such thing as frontend development. only full stack. and react for all the trillions of words written about it, what can you actually do with it? not much. also it's over-saturated as hell. you think there's high demand, you're right, now try applying for a position and see how it goes. there are two types of roles in modern web dev: 1 .90% of jobs are code monkey work: extremely saturated, you are competing with…

While I agree with the message you are trying to convey, the 2020 case doesn't have to be more complicated than the 2010 case: 2010 edit an html button: 0. Install an ftp client (you need to mention that if you mention installing git) 1. pull the file from ftp or sourcesafe/svn 2. edit the button 3. upload to ftp 2020 edit an html button: 1. clone the code 2. edit the html button 3. commit changes

You can’t test the 2020 code without Node.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#123

Post by npteljes »

>Has anyone either switched from doing web development type work to something else they enjoy more for similar reasons?

I became a manager of engineers, so now these all are not my problem anymore. I'll do my tinkering in Factorio and Entropy TD, and I build as big of a spaghetti as I'd like.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#124

Post by ok123456 »

johnfn wrote: post #47
coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

> Why does this happen? It happens because these technologies solve real problem for some subset of their users. Usually when people are saying that technology has become too complicated, it's because they happen to be looking from a perspective where the problems that the technology solves are invisible to them. That doesn't mean that the problem isn't important - it just means the problem isn't important for them .…

Typescript is basically required to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot with Javascript.

Type annotation also serves as a form of 'hard' documentation. If it's wrong or no longer correct, it will make things turn orange in your IDE and make your type linting tool go bonkers. Even as a single developer this has tremendous benefits. It's much easier to come back to something you wrote months/years ago and get back into it rather than having to go through each function to see what it returns under every situation.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#125

Post by bottlepalm »

yrgulation wrote: post #100
bottlepalm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you've used Entity Framework, but you can do compos (with logic) amazing complex queries with relatively little code in a way that is statically typed and super easy to maintain. I'm talking about pulling heavily structured data from the database without having to pull from flat tables and structure it yourself server side. Also working with databases with thousands of tables and relationships, hundreds o…

But you can already write amazingly complex queries in sql, and structure them as objects directly using pdo. If there are hundreds of developers working against the same codebase then that codebase is too large. If you need to query hundreds of tables in one go you need to consider denormalisation or using a document storage.

The ORM code will be 10x smaller than the generated SQL, especially for structured data and composing queries.

Not to mention that static typing which is going to ensure your query is valid when the code compiles, no typos. Plus maintainability of finding all references of tables/fields. Plus the ability to quicky refactor all of that. Plus mapping to DTOs.

I didn't even get into entity tracking which is a whole other heavily used huge use case for an ORM.

I feel like someone debating the merits of Typescript 10 years ago. Raw SQL is a mess to maintain for the same reasons.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#126

Post by erlich »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #18

no such thing as frontend development. only full stack. and react for all the trillions of words written about it, what can you actually do with it? not much. also it's over-saturated as hell. you think there's high demand, you're right, now try applying for a position and see how it goes. there are two types of roles in modern web dev: 1 .90% of jobs are code monkey work: extremely saturated, you are competing with…

It’s crazy and impressive how we devs created this fucking huge industry where hundreds of millions was spent to solve a problem that didn’t really exist and actually made things harder and more expensive.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#127

Post by pindab0ter »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #119
ScottStevenson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why does this happen? I wrote about a hypothesis here: https://medium.com/@scott.stevenson/how-to-finally-make-some... Most of us are scared by the ambiguity of actual creative work, so unless we are under the threat of deadline, we seek out "structured games" to play so that we can put off the anxiety of freeform work. These games are: (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcas…

I call these games ‘using emacs’. (as an emacs user)

I use Arch, btw.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#128

Post by xd »

stavros wrote: post #96
xd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just my opinion based on 20+ years of developing data management solutions across thousands of customers.. any framework employs a set of beliefs and that creates a box you are constrained to think in, hell SQL is one of them boxes. You say "They're not a replacement for being knowledgeable in SQL whatsoever." .. so what are they then? Edit: I once spent/wasted almost 2 years of my life trying to develop the ult…

They're a convenience for 99.9% of use cases. For the other 0.1%, I write SQL, but to be honest, I've never had to yet. You can deliver business value with boring glue code.

So you have 0.1% SQL skill .. work on it.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#129

Post by robin_reala »

dimmke wrote: post #9

>I’ve hit a point where it just doesn’t seem like the end justifies the means in the vast majority of cases anymore I agree, but the only path forward is to change the specifications for HTML/CSS/JavaScript. As an industry we need to accept that these technologies get used to build web pages as well as software and adjust. This will remove a ton of the tooling. I think there are 3 basic things we could do to solve th…

Number 3 is the ARIA spec right? You should be using that already if you’re writing accessible applications.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#130

Post by xd »

bottlepalm wrote: post #125
yrgulation wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can already write amazingly complex queries in sql, and structure them as objects directly using pdo. If there are hundreds of developers working against the same codebase then that codebase is too large. If you need to query hundreds of tables in one go you need to consider denormalisation or using a document storage.

The ORM code will be 10x smaller than the generated SQL, especially for structured data and composing queries. Not to mention that static typing which is going to ensure your query is valid when the code compiles, no typos. Plus maintainability of finding all references of tables/fields. Plus the ability to quicky refactor all of that. Plus mapping to DTOs. I didn't even get into entity tracking which is a whole othe…

Can you show me an example of the 10x less code?
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