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Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#41

Post by scrollaway »

mabbo wrote: post #21

Some 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 doesn't fit their app.

I say this as a heavy Lambda user (https://hearthsim.info/blog/how-we-process-replays/). Lambda is super useful if you have to scale CPU-heavy tasks. I do think that model will play a big role in the future, but I definitely do not think it'll be the go-to model for backend. It's a complete paradigm change.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#42

Post by brad0 »

I think as standards become more adopted it will become easier to use tooling for the majority of backend development.

What is it that keeps backend developers in a job? We write code to give access to data in a way a consumer can use.

ie: we have input, we process the input and give the output (CS 101)

Every time we write something new one or more of those three elements has changed. Input, Processing or Output.

eg:

Input: The DB has a new table with data you need to expose on the website

Processing: The list of comments need to be ordered by upvotes rather than chronologically

Output: The existing JSON output also needs to be output as protobuf

Whenever any one of these elements is standardised it reduces our workload. Usually as a result of standardisation tools and frameworks are developed to take advantage of this.

If you want to know the future of any technology keep on top of their standards.

EDIT:

As well as keeping track of standards you should extrapolate what would happen if everybody adopted that standard. Who knows, maybe you could build a tool everyone uses and start a business around it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#44

Post by nahname »

caseymarquis wrote: post #31
douche wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the classic "Can't you just add another checkbox here?" situation. Yes, I can add a checkbox there. But I have to add the code to include that setting in the API that the front-end calls, to give you a way to retrieve it and change it. Then I have to add code to the data access layer for this new setting. Then I have to write the SQL scripts to add columns/tables for this new setting, as well as change scripts t…

Sounds like your framework sucks. With an orm and some sort of json serialization that's literally just: Put bagel in toaster. Update the db model. Add a migration. Update the viewmodel db model translation in relevant requests. Get bagel and butter it. Commit. Test the migration on a staging db if feeling paranoid, cause it's just adding a column. Push to master. Update production. Take last bite of bagel. If you ar…

So simple anyone with at least three to five years experience and 4 months on the project can do it! Starting salary is 120k, relo to SF required.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#45

Post by grosbisou »

caseymarquis wrote: post #31
douche wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the classic "Can't you just add another checkbox here?" situation. Yes, I can add a checkbox there. But I have to add the code to include that setting in the API that the front-end calls, to give you a way to retrieve it and change it. Then I have to add code to the data access layer for this new setting. Then I have to write the SQL scripts to add columns/tables for this new setting, as well as change scripts t…

Sounds like your framework sucks. With an orm and some sort of json serialization that's literally just: Put bagel in toaster. Update the db model. Add a migration. Update the viewmodel db model translation in relevant requests. Get bagel and butter it. Commit. Test the migration on a staging db if feeling paranoid, cause it's just adding a column. Push to master. Update production. Take last bite of bagel. If you ar…

> cause it's just adding a column

This kind of mentality is why most applications are shit and broken. And why most hires are worthless.

And everyone is not working on a cookie cutter over-bloated rails website. Sorry but this kind of remark simplifying our job always pisses me off.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#46

Post by sotojuan »

rimantas wrote: post #34
digitalarborist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think custom backends are going away either, I do think it will become way less prevalent then it is today though, similarly how all programs used to do manual memory management, this hasn't gone away but most programmers now rely on garbage collection. So much of backend work is redundant, login, user info management, allowing the creation of groups of users, user following, user data uploading or sharing. N…

With react native and electron web stack is running in circles. How many times should this be repeated: web stack is easier to write only if you don't know shit of the native SDKs. Otherwise it does not even compare.

Well yeah... that's the point of React Native isn't it? For people who don't know Swift or Objective-C and want an iPhone app. React Native apps are faster to write for them and perform well.

I can't comment on how they compare with native iOS apps.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#47

Post by obihill »

mabbo wrote: post #21

Some 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…

I agree in principle with most of what you've said here. The server-side is going to be a lot more intelligent in the near future though. My prediction is that every cloud provider is going to have some sort of AWS Lambda service that will eventually become like a server-less toolkit in the cloud. And these platforms could eventually have some augmented intelligence built-in.

Essentially, we can't keep teaching each and every developer database connections, SQL, et al. The cognitive load associated with these sort of programs actually slows down advancement, and the quicker you can setup cloud-powered services that get the job done, the better it will be. Although, I can't say what that will do the livelihood of developers. We'll have to wait and see.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#48

Post by k__ »

My take:

FaaS will become big.

Back-end development with this will become so easy that a front-end dev can cobble together a pretty performant and secure back-end.

Only FaaS provider will hire back-end devs.

I think since much is transitioning to realtime data (which FaaS can't do godo ATM), there is still a huge demand for back-end devs in the next years.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#49

Post by caleblloyd »

mabbo wrote: post #21

Some 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 lamda functions any day.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#50

Post by jalfresi »

Zekio wrote: post #33
jbb555 wrote: post #5

WebAssembly 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.

Well hopefully WebAssembly will fix the 20% CPU util to scroll on some websites because of the insane amount of JS

For me, this sums up the current state of front-end web dev. If you have so much JS on page that it affects scrolling, the problem is not the scrolling...
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