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Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

pagedraw.io

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Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

> "Steak before sizzle"

I like it!

> That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either.

Exactly. "Avoid premature optimisation" doesn't mean "make it as slow as possible", it just means "use std::vector until it becomes an issue instead of hand-coding some arcane data structure in assembler".

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#92
post #83
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

From an operations perspective, there are three critical things: Security, Durability, Availability. From my perspective, that's the order of importance too, but any one without the other two and you're not going to gain or retain customers.

Your order also captures permanence. If another actor gains access to the data, I cant revoke it. If I lose the data, I cant access it. If I cant access the data now, I can try again later.

On your second point ... Im not sure. Sony is still in business. Equifax and co are still printing money. OPM is still around. Security and trust doesnt seem so binary in practice.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#94
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

> Get something done and working, even if performance sucks.

Often if "performance sucks" then it isn't done and isn't working. Performance is a client requirement like any other.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#95
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

[deleted]

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, and Elementor (a WordPress plugin) have all caught on. The first three are more than page-builders, but the page-builder is an important component. They're just not popular with the HN crowd.

So true, I have seen total beginners create nice looking pages with the tools you've mentioned, but if they stay in it for the long haul they find themselves limited by these tools - after which they either gain the technical skills required and move away from the page-builder or hire a dev. That's why I personally won't use such tools. They make it quicker to begin with, but I'll inevitably find myself fighting agai…

I used Elementor for a recent site but it churns out such bloated code that I was worried my performance was taking a hit. Ended up writing everything from scratch in HTML and site performance has improved by 25%+

It's not a dealbreaker for most businesses but when you're competing on SEO, these little things matter

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#97
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

> Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Often if "performance sucks" then it isn't done and isn't working. Performance is a client requirement like any other.

True, but when writing a 2D card game, aiming for an engine capable of doing 3D VR at 120fps is probably a bit too much.

Yet it is what I sometimes see when this performance discussions take place.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

That depends on the game.

Writing casual games with AAA tech is needless overengeniring.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#99
post #90
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh, I don't think your example disproves the idea you're responding to. Perhaps video games MUST deliver performance in the end , but often game prototypes are not performant at all for the sake of rapid experimentation, and are only optimized towards the end of development once all the systems are set in stone...which is what's being advocated for here.

In the old days, customers would never be able to get their hands on video game prototypes. You had one shot. Today, it's obviously a bit different, though many companies still treat it like one shot anyway.

Sure they would.

Game studios were one of the first areas to care for UX.

During the 80's and early 90's many kids got into games by starting as group testers after school.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#100

Sorry to hear about the shutdown, and it looks like it was a pretty useful tool. Great that they open sourced it. The source code looks very interesting (and a bit unusual for a React app.) [1] Looks like Coffeescript + "Coffeescript JSX", which I hadn't heard of before. I didn't look too closely, but I didn't see how they're doing state management in the editor. No Redux in the package.json [2]. I was hoping that I…

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html is how we felt about Coffeescript + JSX

Frankly, picking a non-conventional language in order to associate yourself with "true hackers" is PG's least useful advice. I am not even sure if he would still agree today. Hackers use the language they are most comfortable with and that gets things done. Everything else is secondary. I wrote a blog post on the subject [1].

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2018/12/01/why-paul-graham-wrong/

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