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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#121

Post by whiteopinions »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

This sounds like you wrote something extremely limited. The client will inevitably ask for some modification to it, and if you're not there to do it the next developer is going to curse at you for writing such a brain dead application.

I've seen comments like this on HN and then I've seen these types of applications in the wild. I call it the most dishonest form of consulting you can do. You've put a real shine on some inflexible shit and the clients obviously have no way of knowing what they've bought into.

>It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on.

These people are incapable of correctly evaluating work they contract out, or who is doing it. Why do you think you're an exception in this case?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#122

Post by GordonS »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

I take a similar approach for 9/10 of the enterprise web apps I build, but use ASP.NET Core MVC instead of PHP, and I also favour SASS.

Point is that SSR (Server-Side Rendering), with a sprinkling of simple JavaScript and XHR calls as required, is enough for almost everything I do, and it means build are really simple. Doubly so with a strongly typed language like C#.

I've worked on Angular and Vue projects, and the complexity level was (subjectively) much higher, despite these particular web apps not requiring any real level of client-side functionality. I find JS tests to be much more complex and brittle than C# ones too. Honestly, I hated it! Now, some of this was undoubtedly because I'm more comfortable with what I know, but certainly not all of it.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#123

Post by GenerocUsername »

neya wrote: post #51

Because, Webpages have become complicated. Suddenly, you have all this interactivity going on, which you didn't have a decade ago. We went from a series of simple hyperlinked inter-connected webpages to all these popups shoving onto our face, useless fake computer bots pretending to be tech-support and finally big co. tracking every single click, every pixel of your mouse movement. The web has come a long way to supp…

I'm a 'framework oriented' web developer, and I also love barebones webpages.

As a developer, I can say that it is designers and product owners who push for the needless jazz in many many cases.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#125

Post by j88439h84 »

bob1029 wrote: post #49
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.

The market may be large, but that seems like saying the market for cooks is large. The work required for doing 4 sites is double the work required for doing 2. Unless theres some scaling secret I dont know about.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#126

Post by ht85 »

Does all the hate have to do with sexiness?

To many people, backend and infrastructure work is sexy. They would happily get their hands dirty and spend insane amounts of time debugging mind-boggling issues as long as they happen server-side.

Frontend work on the other hand is not, it seems. Maybe that's because the biggest problem of high quality frontend development is to figure out how to deal with users (who most deveopers seem to abhor), and how to navigate the, say... complicated circumstances that are browsers.

Maybe building something that has to work in an environment you can't control is just a little too stressful for most devs?

Personally I really don't care. I love doing great architectural work, but in the end I'm all about expertise and I don't discriminate. If I have to step-debug inside webpack plugins or understand Safari CORS handling quirks, so be it. I'm a software engineer, but to me sexiness is in relentlessly looking for an edge, happy customers and signed contracts.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#128

Post by onion2k »

mort96 wrote: post #44
tschellenbach wrote: post #10

It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.

"Everyone wants a SPA" is such bullshit. GitHub used to just load for a hundred milliseconds and then show me everything I needed; now it loads for a hundred milliseconds and shows me a spinner while it does another roundtrip for some javascript, then parses and executes that giant truckload of code, then does _another_ roundtrip to get the JSON or whatever describing the data I actually want to see, then executes it…

GitHub works without JS just fine. Switch it off.

In fact, I'm pretty sure Github is rendered server side for the first load. You shouldn't be seeing any spinners. I'd check if I wasn't on my phone.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#129

Post by reaperducer »

diminoten wrote: post #89
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

Yeah, because the people hiring you have no clue what kind of a maintainability hellscape you're leaving for the next person... Also I'm 97% sure I could own your site in under a day, based on how home-baked you just said it is, and I'm garbage at pen testing. Healthcare site, you say? Jesus Christ, I hope they have data breach insurance.

Also I'm 97% sure I could own your site in under a day, based on how home-baked you just said it is, and I'm garbage at pen testing.

The internal and external security audits already performed by the billion-dollar healthcare company in question disagree with you.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#130

Post by enraged_camel »

castis wrote: post #104
afarrell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

It most certainly is actionable advice, but it's usefulness depends on how well you take blunt advice.

What exactly is actionable about it? Just curious.
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