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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

#101

Post by quickthrower2 »

aspencer8111 wrote: post #34
beachy wrote: post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

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…

Just apply some common sense and paretos rule. I.e don’t do something dumb because there is no measure. E.g. a loop that needlessly iterates a billion times.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#102

Post by spyhi »

PakG1 wrote: post #90
spyhi wrote: 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.

Yeah, but even in the old days the developers would still be prototyping. Internal stakeholders are still stakeholders, and it’s developers optimizing for things other than speed. Nintendo devs famously build nothing until Mario’s jump (the MVP) feels right.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#103

Post by realusername »

iliketosleep wrote: post #85
jameslk wrote: post #46

> Ultimately, we think Pagedraw is the wrong product. We think you can get 90% of the benefits of Pagedraw by just using JSX better. Our findings on this will be controversial, as they go entirely against the current “best practices,” so we’ll save them for a later blog post. I'd like to hear more about this. I'm not sure if it was ever turned into a blog post? I don't understand how using JSX differently can elimina…

You've probably seen their blog post from other comments, which doesn't directly address the issue. They essentially made a visual editor for developers - this is the crux of the issue. It's easy for developers to add, preview, and edit components without a purpose-built visual editor. They appear to suggest that following some of the "technical lessons" in their blog post is what these devs really need - not a visua…

That's exactly the whole problem with web editors:

- If they abstract a lot, you can target designers but then it inevitably produce unmaintainable spaghetti code because it does not know exactly where you are going

- If you abstract it less, you can only target developers but what's the point for developers to use an UI when they have to know how to code in the first place?

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#104

Post by miki123211 »

cr0sh wrote: post #69
aspencer8111 wrote: post #34

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 your security design working first.

Tbe ahove applies to accessibility too, by the same reasoning.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#105

Post by 19870213 »

taneq wrote: post #91
cr0sh wrote: 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…

> "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".

I would personally expand it to this: Steak before sizzle, but don't get everyone sick by serving it raw...

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#106

Post by z3t4 »

jtreminio wrote: post #72
z3t4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 20k LOC in 3 years is impressive. And I agree that you should watch out for premature optimization an premature abstraction. What i found most interesting was using coffeescript that compiles to js that compiles to react that compiles to js. They might have been too focused on the technical side. You should probably pick the most boring and proven tech stack and focused more on the actual problem.

Would you say the same thing if they were using Typescript instead of Coffeescript?

An actual problem might be how to generate a responsive design for "mobile" and different screen sizes. That's what you should focus on. The problem with picking new cool tools and languages is that you might end up solving dev/sys-ops issues, learning how to use them, and develop additional tooling, instead of solving actual problems. Unless you think it's a really good fit for the actual problem domain and thus worth the extra investments.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#107

Post by zimpenfish »

aspencer8111 wrote: post #34
beachy wrote: post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

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…

I once had a multi-day argument with the other 2 devs on the team about whether a set of MySQL queries and code would scale to thousands of reporting devices. My stance was that it didn't matter because if we didn't make the TWENTY devices we had work by next week, we'd lose that contract and pretty soon our jobs.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#108

Post by elcomet »

realusername wrote: post #103
iliketosleep wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've probably seen their blog post from other comments, which doesn't directly address the issue. They essentially made a visual editor for developers - this is the crux of the issue. It's easy for developers to add, preview, and edit components without a purpose-built visual editor. They appear to suggest that following some of the "technical lessons" in their blog post is what these devs really need - not a visua…

That's exactly the whole problem with web editors: - If they abstract a lot, you can target designers but then it inevitably produce unmaintainable spaghetti code because it does not know exactly where you are going - If you abstract it less, you can only target developers but what's the point for developers to use an UI when they have to know how to code in the first place?

That's true for now, but I believe we will get there eventually. Who is writing assembly code anymore ? You can argue that compilers produce unmaintanable spaghetti assembly code, which is certainly true. But almost no one will look at the assembly output.

The next step we are currently in: a lot of new languages compile to C. And it produces absolutely unreadable code. But who wants to read and write C when you can get the same speed with a much nicer language ?

I agree visual editing may be more complicated than compiling / transpiling, but I believe we'll get there eventually, and people will no longer read and write css manually.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#109

Post by lucideer »

aspencer8111 wrote: post #34
beachy wrote: post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

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…

The commenter you’re replying to isn’t saying “performance first”, they’re just saying “performance matters”.

In other words—don’t go to extremes in any direction.

It sounds very much like this conpany took an extreme perf-first approach from the outset, and advocate a reactionary overcompensated opposite extreme in their postmortem.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#110

Post by PakG1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #99
PakG1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At that point, they were insiders or even employees, not final customers, no? Games were released onto cartridges that couldn't be updated once the cartridges were manufactured and in the customer's hands.
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