Ask HN: Where can one learn about boring web development?

This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at https://grugbrain.dev/ which is written by the guy behind https://htmx.org/ -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity.

This recent talk from Djangocon "React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product" might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GObi93tjZI

Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at https://workers.tools/. The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts "no JS is shipped to the client by default". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering.

The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for "the modern Rails".

As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's a lot easier to use them than manage it yourself. And with the new serverless stuff, we're actually pretty close to how CGI on shared hosting used to be where you could upload a script and not have to worry about the gory details so much.

Yep, where is the documentation for modern JS without any libraries?

Preferably something that doesn't try to teach you what an if and a loop are first.

Backend: PHP with Laravel I haven't used it in a while since I work on greenfield projects now. But when I did, Laravel did wonders. Documentation is complete, everything you need is documented and it's basically copy and paste for all the common things.

Frontend: Hard to say. If you don't need much functionality, just use basic HTML, JS and CSS. Render your HTML with PHP and use the minimum amount of JS you can.

Otherwise I'd say React. I work with it every day and I think it's great. But wouldn't consider it to be "boring" at all. There's new things every day and you need to keep up & navigate the traps.

Unfortunately frontend is still very unstable until now.