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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

macwright.org

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#161

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

runawaybottle wrote: post #139

I’m tempted to step back and evaluate this on another level. Our industry is very big, and any industry that gets that big will be able to house a lot of people just for the sake of it. If you think we have a large amount of fresh frontend people, understand they are hired almost with a one to one correspondence with fresh product/business people. Modern product development is essentially a polishing job on every com…

What do you consider "our industry" to be ?

Software development? Web development? What used to be called "Application Development" back in the 1980s and early 1990s?

I'm asking because there's a lot of software developers/engineers whose jobs don't feature any of the keywords in your comment ("Frontend", "Backend", "SQL queries", "modal" etc. etc.)

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#162

Post by save_ferris »

runawaybottle wrote: post #139

I’m tempted to step back and evaluate this on another level. Our industry is very big, and any industry that gets that big will be able to house a lot of people just for the sake of it. If you think we have a large amount of fresh frontend people, understand they are hired almost with a one to one correspondence with fresh product/business people. Modern product development is essentially a polishing job on every com…

> There’s so much money in this industry that we can hire entire teams to basically take a Bootstrap component, and theme it.

This feels a tad reductionist based on my experience. Sure, most apps are designed around an agreed-upon set of affordances and design principles that the community determines, but modeling application behavior for real-world scenarios involves way more than theming a bootstrap component. I think it’s a mistake to reduce a developer down to the code that they write, because the ultimate value of a developer is in the code that they choose not to write just as much as the code they do write.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#163

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

MattGaiser wrote: post #111
simonw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great anecdote. It aligns with my big worry here: we are raising a cohort of front-end developers who don't know how to use plain HTML and forms!

That's what the C devs said about all the people learning Java. "We are raising a cohort of developers who knows nothing about memory management." Sure, there are things you do not know if all you know is React, but technological changes make it irrelevant in all but the most niche of cases.

Except that "niche cases" here means "everything you do with software but not in a web browser".

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#164

Post by mosdl »

luxphl wrote: post #104
burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

This is what I meant by gatekeeping; there is common misconception that you have to go looking for a library to solve a problem. And it makes it seem like there's a higher barrier to entry than there is. But the reality is that React is plain HTML and Javascript, in a less error-prone and maintainable package. Everything you can do with vanilla JS you can do in React, but with React you benefit from being forced to s…

You still have to debug those - if you set the wrong state/etc, things will break like before.

All react does is remove the need to modify the DOM directly when you want to modify things.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#165

Post by zerkten »

MattGaiser wrote: post #111
simonw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great anecdote. It aligns with my big worry here: we are raising a cohort of front-end developers who don't know how to use plain HTML and forms!

That's what the C devs said about all the people learning Java. "We are raising a cohort of developers who knows nothing about memory management." Sure, there are things you do not know if all you know is React, but technological changes make it irrelevant in all but the most niche of cases.

> That's what the C devs said about all the people learning Java.

That's not a great argument here. Web development is much more of a continuous spectrum. Programming platforms are designed to hide the the layers beneath to a large degree. I'm not saying there aren't leaky abstractions!

We use the term "full stack" for web developers, but people visualize this with layers, but for me it's a really wide list of items and not a very tall stack.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#166

Post by pier25 »

I think one of the big reasons a lot of people are moving to SPA or SSR + hydration is latency of dynamic content (static content can be cached at the edge with little effort).

The problem with traditional PHP/Rails/Django apps is that those cannot easily run on multiple locations. Even if you somehow find an easy way to redirect the user to a server near them you still have to solve the problem of replicating the database. Big companies with cash and talent can solve all that but for small dev teams this is much harder to solve with a traditional web dev approach.

With an SPA your user will click and the UI will refresh instantly, even if it's just to show a spinner or some mock data, but that will be enough to distract the user for the time it will take for the API to respond.

With SSR you can run your html rendering code in serverless functions at the edge. Your latency will be sub 100ms, even sub 50ms when you hit the DB cache. I'm doing this with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV as a cache and using Fauna DB which is also ditributed and running close to the edge. If it wasn't because the local dev experience of workers is still in alpha I'd say I've hit the jackpot of performance and DX.

Scaling is another matter but I don't think it's such a common problem for the vast majority of projects as latency which happens on every request.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#167

Post by reroute1 »

fish45 wrote: post #159
waheoo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Its a pretty apt description if you know anything about adhd or have it.

I have adhd. in my experience, commodifying the use of ADHD as anything other than a mental disorder makes it easier for people to make claims like "everyone is a little bit adhd" etc.

Maybe we are? Suggesting the whole world stop doing this is silly bud

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#168

Post by Polylactic_acid »

runawaybottle wrote: post #139

I’m tempted to step back and evaluate this on another level. Our industry is very big, and any industry that gets that big will be able to house a lot of people just for the sake of it. If you think we have a large amount of fresh frontend people, understand they are hired almost with a one to one correspondence with fresh product/business people. Modern product development is essentially a polishing job on every com…

The alternative is just having premade components lazily glued together. It seems that the markets have decided that highly polished custom tools are worth the cost.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#169

Post by MattGaiser »

zerkten wrote: post #165
MattGaiser wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the C devs said about all the people learning Java. "We are raising a cohort of developers who knows nothing about memory management." Sure, there are things you do not know if all you know is React, but technological changes make it irrelevant in all but the most niche of cases.

> That's what the C devs said about all the people learning Java. That's not a great argument here. Web development is much more of a continuous spectrum. Programming platforms are designed to hide the the layers beneath to a large degree. I'm not saying there aren't leaky abstractions! We use the term "full stack" for web developers, but people visualize this with layers, but for me it's a really wide list of items…

> but for me it's a really wide list of items and not a very tall stack.

That is fair. You need a bit of many technologies to launch a website. I always interpreted full-stack to mean that you could launch a site on your own, from the database to the buttons and thus do not require a dedicated frontend, backend, or dba.

But yes, that makes developers wide and not deep.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#170

Post by Polylactic_acid »

theonething wrote: post #137
mgummelt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React still requires you to write HTML and forms.

And it makes it harder to do so. I hate doing forms in React. You basically have to reinvent the plumbing that's already standard with the HTML spec. Very tedious.

It literally doesn't. You can build a fully normal HTML form in react. The only reason to do any of it yourself is because you need something regular forms can't provide and even then you can still use as little or as much custom parts yourself.
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