171–180 of 292 posts
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Please write the blog post. It may be a hard sell but think of it more as a creative conversation with the future of web dev. While you may not get the final answer “correct”, your post will help the community progress a much needed discussion.
Thanks, and I will. It's at about 3000 words and I have been sitting on it, but I think I am going to just finish it up and release it and see what discussion it generates.
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You think you did a funny but you’d be surprised how many php devs dont know php.
Oh, all of them.
PHP. Use PHP, it’s so crazy easy for web development. - No compiling, - no middleware, - no state (which also means no memory leaks), - just drop a file on web server and it works (no crazy CI pipeline), - the documentation is fantastic, - it’s extremely fast, and - no surprises because it’s tried and true. PHP is so under appreciated.
Ehh, what? Sessions are state.
> - just drop a file on web server and it works (no crazy CI pipeline)
Except when I have to set-up php-fpm, opcache and configure countless parameters in php.ini.
> - the documentation is fantastic,
Yes, but I still have to check it for useless constructs like "mysql_real_escape_string" vs "mysql_escape_string" which should have never existed in the first place.
PHP didn't earn its reputation without a reason. But I'm glad to hear that certain things are improving.
I just use Go for a self contained back end and server. For the front end I use the html templates, but for the most part it is traditional html, css, and js. No compiling js. That said, I primarily work in other areas. This is just for when I need a web app.
The fix is to reevaluate and start over. That's way harder than continuing to use what's available so things continue as they have been.
I haven't used React for a while but it definitely made developing for different browsers much easier but it you wanted to do a simple app it was way harder to use it. It all comes down to what you are creating and reaching for the right tool.
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> 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 .…
I agree with the sentiment so this comment is more of a nitpick than anything constructive, but I do feel you may have missed the mark with the typescript example. Even if you don't want to use TS in it's full glory, you can just rename your files with a `.ts`, turn strict mode off, run everything through the compilation step, and weed out a category of simple mistakes from that alone. Add in that you can slowly add…
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> 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 .…
I agree with the sentiment so this comment is more of a nitpick than anything constructive, but I do feel you may have missed the mark with the typescript example. Even if you don't want to use TS in it's full glory, you can just rename your files with a `.ts`, turn strict mode off, run everything through the compilation step, and weed out a category of simple mistakes from that alone. Add in that you can slowly add…
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…
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Totally agreed re keeping an open mind. But after having used all the niceties you describe i understood that php itself is a fractal of poor design and practices. Gave up on using literally everything you described and ended up writing better code at a fraction of the time. I do recommend reflecting on things as not knowing everything goes both ways.
I am concerned how much your posts center around you writing code and not a team. Are you concerned about maintainability? Have you written software with large teams before and have had to maintain that software over a number of years?
Of course i wrote in large teams, thats why i know that a large codebase with hundreds of people working on it is usually a sign of either bad practice (the monolith that grew too much) or high turnover (php work places are often toxic and filled by mediocrity).
Instead of ignoring my advice on maintainability, consider breaking your code into smaller chunks and write less code that doesnt solve self inflicted issues (ie your complex queries across hundreds of tables, dtos that dont solve much, custom functions for stuff that can already be done in sql). Once you do the above you wont need all of the overhead you describe and so specific to php.
My code usually lasts a good number of years, often even after i’m no longer working on it. It’s difficult to break and easy to maintain. At least thats the feedback i get from repeat clients. The teams i lead have easily delivered code that generates returns in the billions. All without the mess you describe.
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.