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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

#31
IMO, maybe some technologies do make sense for certain team sizes.

I haven't worked much with React, although every time I did, I felt like everything was overkill.

Then again, I've worked with k8s and while other people may think k8s is overkill, for a team our size – hundreds of devs working on separate microservices, I think it makes sense.

It doesn't make sense for a small startup, but once you get to a certain size, the pure human element forces you to look for alternatives. While complex, k8s is actually a great solution to a lot of the problems we were facing.

It's possible that React fits that same need, and while it may seem like overkill to me, maybe I don't know enough about it.

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

#32

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?

We humans are creative creatures. When we are doing the same thing for a long time, we tend to get bored and make change happen. We 'improve' things, we move things about. We 'make things better'. So we are not bored anymore.

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

#33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is if you understand php you dont really need a framework. Sure composer packages are a must to avoid rewriting whats out there, but a framework not so much. When i conducted interviews i was shocked at how many php devs had no clue about what an sql injection is, they almost all answered “the framework does it for you” and it was such a basic thing.

Oh god ORM's, pointless waste of time and just an excuse not to learn SQL.. almost as bad as the #1 PHP fallacy; Smarty (which is still a thing).

But “what if we switch to a different database engine”? Yet i’ve never seen that happen!

Edit: wait smarty still a thing!?

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

#34

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…

> request sudo from IT

If you work for a company that doesn't give you Sudo on your own machine as a developer by default, find a new job

Don't work for companies that still treat their professionals like children.

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

#35

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…

Speaking of ops. What is the simplest reproducible way to accomplish this task. - create vm instance ( setup firewall, users, network dna, stuff) - install : apache, runtime - install app.

Set it up once. Snapshot an image (called an AMI on AWS, but applies on all cloud services). Use the image to make new identical instances.

You can also script the process with (for example) Terraform.

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

#36

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…

> request sudo from IT If you work for a company that doesn't give you Sudo on your own machine as a developer by default, find a new job Don't work for companies that still treat their professionals like children.

Easier said than done. This style of doing things is very common in large corporate environments such as financial services. The first time anybody works at a place like this they are shocked by all the IT red tape, but it's an interesting (and frustrating) rite of passage. It takes maturity and experience to understand that there is always a reason for "stupid" complications.

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

#37
I had an epiphany two years ago when GDPR came into effect. USA Today had this fancy page, but to comply with the new law they created an eu.* subdomain where they basically just showed articles. Text and images and very basic css, not even a fancy navigation. It was blazingly fast, just doing normal complete reloads between pages. I bet it was even cheap to make. So I realized, actually most of these things like SPAs are not truly needed, not even AMP was needed, they are just a bandaid on the complexity we add ourselves, and the kicker is, the users for the most part don't care about any of that. They just want to consume your content.

If your heart is still in it, I'd try to learn a skill that will be relevant forever. Something that would be a part of a university curriculum, not a framework. As others have pointed out, other areas of the industry are not necessarily better. An anegdote from a colleague there: he was maintaining a simple PHP backend where people bought stuff the company was selling. Another team built a replacement for this, real engineers, microservices, elasticsearch, containers, kubernetes, took forever. They switched it on and a week later noticed they are having less sales. They switched back to their legacy backend and everything was fine again.

edit: also I interviewed a bit last year and it was mostly that you'd think people are making space shuttles. You get asked all these technical questions, about JS and so, and then when I asked about, hey what do you actually do as a developer, what are your daily tasks. And the answers are, well we had to recently make our gallery page responsive. Sad.

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

#38

I had an epiphany two years ago when GDPR came into effect. USA Today had this fancy page, but to comply with the new law they created an eu.* subdomain where they basically just showed articles. Text and images and very basic css, not even a fancy navigation. It was blazingly fast, just doing normal complete reloads between pages. I bet it was even cheap to make. So I realized, actually most of these things like SPA…

If your heart is still in it, I'd try to learn a skill that will be relevant forever.

Electrician

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

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god ORM's, pointless waste of time and just an excuse not to learn SQL.. almost as bad as the #1 PHP fallacy; Smarty (which is still a thing).

But “what if we switch to a different database engine”? Yet i’ve never seen that happen! Edit: wait smarty still a thing!?

I used Postgres when I first started out in ~2002 but it was slow, really slow, I switched to MySQL and it was fast and the customers happy. The MyISAM table engine was shit hot(fast) but it took me years to get my head around constraints and then indexes etc to actually get a basic level of competence and realise MyISAM was a bunch of trade off's for performance. Anyway I loved PG and still do romanise it.. what if I stayed.. what could have been.. but it didn't get the job done, for me.

Edit: oh yeah Smarty is still a thing and so is PHPClasses.org whilst I think about it.. I've nothing against PHPClasses apart from it tries to pass itself off as something other than it is.. an amateur coders exchange.

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

#40
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…

I think what we need is a new spec that compiles down to whatever HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is supported by browsers over time. Waiting for browser vendors to agree on a new spec takes far too long.

The same thing happens in all of comp-sci: we create a new programming language that compiles to an old language (C to Assembly) because changing the old one takes longer than inventing a new one.

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