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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…
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.
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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.
This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…
I agree with most of your premise, but I think you overstate it a bit. Like the GP's point above, it seems like you're describing bad engineers. In the good web dev agencies I've worked at, they work pretty hard to make informed decisions which stay within budget and timeline. It doesn't always happen, but that's not just due to poor practice.
The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…
I used to think when I first started my company that I could just do every part of it far better than anyone else. I would push on my employees pretty hard and often denigrate their efforts. As the company is continued to grow, I now have 180 full-time employees. The reason I have all these people is that they can do enormously more work than I can and most of them are now better at doing their individual job than I am.
I think your comment visits are tendency as tech people to view ourselves in the best possible light, and to view other people as not as good. We especially tend to view projects we do as big and very complex and project done by others as not impressive.
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> Hard to update CSS. When was the last time you had a go at CSS? So much has changed since 2017. You can chuck out the pre-processor junk and just use CSS variables and CSS Grid. Productivity is 10x. You can even keep it simple so that a page just loads the CSS it needs instead of some 40,000 line ball of junk. Same with templates, if you are using CSS Grid you don't need the sea of div containers, you can just use…
Honest Question, how do I support our IE 11 Customers (8% of our MRR) with this approach?
Also add a banner at the top telling people they need to use their other browser for the page.
What business are you in where 8% are still on IE11?
People seem to get openly frustrated if they can't learn overnight all there is to know about a discipline that has taken some people years and maybe even decades to master.
We as a civilization haven't really had a need to reconcile this I think on the scale that we do today. Nothing was "out in the open" so much so as it is today. But now that I can see it somehow my expectation is that I should immediately understand it.
As more and more information becomes available to the masses we all need to start recognizing that just because we can see it doesn't mean we should expect to be able to understand it.
Real knowledge about how to solve complicated problems takes time and discipline to get to the place we want to be individually and collectively.
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Questions for PHP, and MySQL folks (not meant in a negative way): - PHP: A few years ago I heard about how PHP was needlessly complex. I wonder what the recent status of the programming language is. Specifically, do experienced PHP programmers stick to a subset of PHP, as in "PHP: The good parts"? (similar to "Javascript: The good parts"). (side note: As a diehard python person frustrated due to latest versions becom…
I think the discussion point was php was too easy and that encouraged new developers or less hardcore developers to adopt it. Some of the defaults like globals being turned on by default led to security holes. How people were creating sql statements at the time concating strings led to sql injection issues. There were never any bad parts . There are new features like the spread operator that are newer and not availab…
Where did you get that idea? Postgres can run as any user.
In fact, I recently switched my applications to use Postgres even during unit tests (instead of SQLite), i.e. that testing instance runs under my normal login user. That change actually made the CI go faster because compiling the Go SQLite driver takes much much longer (about 30-60 seconds) than spinning up a Postgres from scratch in a temp directory (about 2 seconds) and using that instead.
@fizixer: I don't use MySQL, but I've heard it's not nearly as bad as it once was. I use PostgreSQL for everything from traditional relational data to time series to job queues and am 100% satisfied. Hasn't once let me down. The only caveat is that clustering is still easier to do with MySQL than with Postgres from what I hear, so if you have really really big setups that require that, that should be considered.
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No, web development overall hasn't. Web apps specifically are largely fad-chasing vanity (manager, organizational level) or that, yeah. Which is cool because there's all kinds of dumb money flying around for them now—that part's been amazing. But it's not serving users well. Peacock feathers.
So a thing nobody wants or needs became extremely commonplace because JS devs (and only JS devs, I guess the Java guys have yet to discover this) realized they could invent some new frameworks and managers would gladly pay six-figures a head for them to play around with it?
I think a lot of the cost has to do with the underlying tech not really being that great for what it's being made to do, in concert with everyone feeling the need to try to be special in even the tinies little looks and behaviors. It's also where a lot of the audience is so will tend to experience oddities like this more exaggeratedly than other fields.
Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? "But it's what google's doing", "but Gartner", but whatever. It's cheaper! OK, sure, here's my bill. It's absolutely follow-the-leader behavior, damn the cliff. And it works well enough that it does get the job done, eventually. It's just not necessarily doing the users any favors, or your bottom line.
Decision makers do strange stuff all the time because they think it makes them look better—and, to the extent and in the way they expect it to, they are probably right more often than not. This is just one example. Whole world's run by guesswork, personal quirks of taste or incentive, and blame-avoidance (follow the trends), more than anything else, from what I've seen. It's just people, running around doing funny people stuff, hoping no-one calls their bluff.
[EDIT] actually, look at Java Applets and, more so, Flash. Folks hated the way lots of those were used, but the worst and least-justifiable uses of them happened anyway, for a long time, because managers wanted the bling. That was, seriously, it. And developers went "oh sweet I can add Flash 5 and Actionscript to my résumé, I've been wanting to play with that". That's exactly what happened then. This is exactly the same thing, just much bigger. And in both cases sometimes the tech was used well.
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Honest Question, how do I support our IE 11 Customers (8% of our MRR) with this approach?
Easy if you don't have to have it pixel perfect for them. Just build it out with CSS Grid and the CSS variables, then look at the broken mess on IE and make it work. Who cares if things are not centered on IE11. It is not an HTML5 browser and is only there for legacy support - ActiveX and all that. Also add a banner at the top telling people they need to use their other browser for the page. What business are you in…