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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#151

Post by davidwparker »

efficax wrote: post #53
mark_and_sweep wrote: post #43

I think the default should be: Don't use any JavaScript if you don't have to. And if you have to, use it responsibly. Recommended reading: - "Responsible JavaScript: Part I" by Jeremy Wagner ( https://alistapart.com/article/responsible-javascript-part-1... ) - "A JavaScript-Free Frontend" by Matt Reyer ( https://dev.to/winduptoy/a-javascript-free-frontend-2d3e ) Disclaimer: I'm from Germany, but have a 6-y/o Android…

javascript rules, and you can't build truly interactive sites without it (try to build a refine-as-you-type search bar with just html and css). Here's my hot take: JS is good and has made the web better.

Challenge accepted!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#152

Post by goatinaboat »

Accacin wrote: post #144
goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

Really? No C++/C/Python developers ever over-engineer anything? I mean, you only need check out all the vulnerabilities in said C++ software for verification of that fact :) I think what you're trying to say is that you don't consider 'webdevs' to be "real" developers.

I consider people getting real work done, without caring what anyone else thinks of their chosen tech, even in Excel VBA to be just as “real” as anyone.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#153

Post by president »

non-entity wrote: post #118
president wrote: post #77

As someone who hasn't done much web development in the last 10 years, it is mind-boggling how much you need to know in order to be a full-stack engineer these days. I tried to start a project a few months ago and just trying to decide on a technology was difficult. Npm, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, React vs Vue vs Angular...I don't even know what half of these tools even do, why they're needed, not to mention the learning c…

I got really jaded along with a few other things and let my skills stagnate for a few years and now I'm looking at jobs and I'm unqualified for all the half decent ones. I'm personally trying to switch out of development, but I kinda wish I had made an effort to at least understand some of the new(ish) stucc

I feel your pain. This is one of the few industries that doesn't value experience. Unless you're spending all your time learning new technologies, it's really easy to become irrelevant.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#154

Post by commandlinefan »

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

> they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community

Well, a lot of them aren’t - until recently, a lot of front-end developers were actually graphic artists who were more skilled in photoshop than software development (not to knock that skill, it’s a useful one!). It doesn’t help that 23-year-old MBA “unicorn startup” founders have bought into this pipe dream model of software development where a couple of eggheads in the unlit server room develop algorithms that the $10/hour mcweb-developers cut-and-paste into beautiful templates.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#155

Post by madeofpalk »

afarrell wrote: post #73
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

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.

But "Javascript makes you build shit software" isn't actionable in the sense that its definitely incorrect.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#156

Post by pojzon »

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…

The worst example I can think of right now is: GMAIL..

God it went downhill lately. It can take 20 seconds on a decent machine for it to load all the shitty plugins i dont even need but still block me from using a mailbox..

Loading "html only" version is pretty much instant and has everything I need to use the demn mailbox..

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#157

Post by diminoten »

reaperducer wrote: post #129
diminoten wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm super glad to hear that happened, but please understand where I'm coming from when I said what I did; reinventing the wheel (as I'm sure you had to here) is straight up dangerous.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#158

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

rochak wrote: post #39
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #9

Because we're no longer making websites, we're making apps. Sure if you just need a simple website, make it from scratch, but good luck maintaining a full blown app using jQuery. It's not just web development that is hard. You can't honestly say any toolchain on the desktop side is any easier. That said, web development is getting easier now that the dust is settling and only a few major frameworks are used. Get star…

I disagree with your ending note. I like React and have been using it professionally for over 2 years, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to use something just because it is an industry standard. At my work, for example, the upper management is now convinced that microservices are going to solve all of their current maintainability problems, while the fact is that there are a lot of employees that write shit code, who w…

My sole reason is to point new developers to the skills that nets them the most job opportunities. Learn the most popular (and imo the best) framework first.

People bitch about the web being too hard and too many choices. Then when you say to just use the most common stack, they bitch that you should choose X instead. Doesn't make any sense.

React also has the largest ecosystem, is the most flexible, and the most feature complete. (I can natively target nearly all mobile/desktop environments)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#159

Post by mark_and_sweep »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #9

Because we're no longer making websites, we're making apps. Sure if you just need a simple website, make it from scratch, but good luck maintaining a full blown app using jQuery. It's not just web development that is hard. You can't honestly say any toolchain on the desktop side is any easier. That said, web development is getting easier now that the dust is settling and only a few major frameworks are used. Get star…

> React is the industry standard, use it.

And all these years I thought that HTML was the industry standard...

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#160

Post by weberc2 »

orf wrote: post #59
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…

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

Right, but will they be able to say that the customer was thrilled with their rewrite? Probably not; they're already mostly happy with the simpler site and now they've paid to make things (almost certainly) more complex than they need to be. They probably feel swindled into agreeing to a rewrite of something that was mostly working but The Next Developer told them that adding that new feature would require completely rewriting the front- and backends.
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