Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I can only think that modern front end development has failed

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 521 posts

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#331

Post by mitchdoogle »

notjustanymike wrote: post #92
throwawayfire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

Good, and commercially successful, don't always go together. Amazon is commercially successful but few would argue their UX is good.

Do we know what the UX goals are for the site or what requirements they had? It's really difficult to gauge these things if we don't even know what they're going for.

Personally, there are some things I have found difficult to do (getting a chat going with a customer service agent) and some things that are very easy (checkout process, making a return). It's no surprise to me that they would make it slightly more difficult to find a live person to chat with since they probably want me to exhaust the other automated methods of solving my problem before doing that. Is that bad UX? I don't think so.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#332

Post by [deleted] »

leephillips wrote: post #293
xyzelement wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their analogy may still hold. My mom claims her cooking is better than the restaurants (arguable) but she's not operating under the constraints of cooking at the variety, consistency and speed that my local diner does. The diner needs to be able to provide hundreds of dishes on short order including on days when the main chef is out. So maybe my mom's once-in-a-while pot of chilly is great but she couldn't ru…

I’m not talking about sites that aren’t beautiful. I’m talking about sites that are user-hostile, annoying, and a pain to navigate. And that seems to have become most of them.

[deleted]

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#333

Post by vikingcaffiene »

y2bd wrote: post #281
withinboredom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s fair to say that we often put too much business logic into the front end. As a back-end dev, this reminds me of the time I used our own product and saw a read-only field on the UI. It was some interesting bit of data that only existed in the database (we didn’t expose it in the API) and I brought it up how cool it was that we were doing that now. The front end dev said, “oh, it’s not from the database,…

Man I’d love it if our backend teams were that willing to make changes for us. So often I stumble across bizarre, complicated business logic in our various client code bases and ask the devs “why is this here? surely this is better put on the backend/already exists on the backed” and am greeted with “we agree, but when we asked the backend teams to make a change on their end they told us it would be done in the next…

That’s aggravating. I do full stack dev and work at startups so that particular scenario hasn’t come up but I could see how that disconnect could create some tech debt. That said, I think it’s a planning process problem. You really should have someone on your project capable of making those changes. People really are the hardest problem.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#334

Post by JohnBooty »

pas wrote: post #294
tomc1985 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do these things even need to be an SPA? What function does that serve when the standardized and infinitely more compatible form-with-a-bit-of-javascript approach works just as well if not better? I work on one such project and it absolutely drives me nuts -- it's a rails app, but the customer front-end (which is literally just a form to fill out) is a React SPA. There is nothing there that couldn't be done with T…

Because that's the mainstream, that's what's easy to procure, hire for, negotiate with vendors, that's the default, the preferred, the future proof, the supported. And the tech doesn't really matter. I hate React with a passion, because Angular is so much more sane - in my experience. But it's fine. It's mature, it can be made to perform completely well. The tech doesn't really matter. The people doesn't matter eithe…

Depressingly correct.

Variations of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", repeated forever.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#335

Post by Chiron1991 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #204
jefftk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier. I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server's job and the client's job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.

Doing the work on the client can sometimes be the right choice, but I'll share a converse point. I was tasked with implementing a bulk record upload feature. The UI was to accept up a CSV file with up to 1 million records. The API provided by the backend team accept max 1,000 records in JSON. So now I have to convert CSV, for which there's no official specification, to JSON, and then make (up to) 1,000 HTTP requests…

That's interesting. From my experience, the backend guys are usually more down-to-earth and often save the frontend guys from doing overcomplicated/bad stuff. Not wanting to implement a file upload endpoint for that task sounds suspiciously like some unmotivated guy that doesn't give a sheit about the app.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#337

Post by gherkinnn »

leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

> I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few times.

Here you go. You make sites for yourself. My own stuff is fucking fast as well.

It gets slow when you have to ward of a thousand idiotic requests and implement maybe 10 of those to shut people up.

While in my own world I’d leave it as it is.

Shitty product is primarily the result of shitty culture. It’s just that FE is visible and atrocious DB calls are not.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#338

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

JohnBooty wrote: post #334
pas wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's the mainstream, that's what's easy to procure, hire for, negotiate with vendors, that's the default, the preferred, the future proof, the supported. And the tech doesn't really matter. I hate React with a passion, because Angular is so much more sane - in my experience. But it's fine. It's mature, it can be made to perform completely well. The tech doesn't really matter. The people doesn't matter eithe…

Depressingly correct. Variations of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", repeated forever.

No-one got fired for writing an SPA, but we did decide not to renew the contract for the next major update.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#339

Post by thekyle »

avl999 wrote: post #97

Hacker News and the old reddit is the pinnacle of user experience for a site of its "genre". The new reddit perfectly exemplifies what @antirez is saying. It's amazing to me that hundreds (thousands?) of people who work at Reddit thought that that user experience was an "improvement" over the old reddit.

It really amazes me how bad new Reddit is. I have a Windows computer from about 5 years ago that I sometimes use. It takes about 10 seconds after clicking on a story for the first comments to load, and there is about a 5-second delay between pressing a key and the character showing up in any of the text input forms.

Even on my new M1 MacBook Air it takes 2/3 seconds for every page to load.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#340

Post by mitchdoogle »

jevgeni wrote: post #295

I started going to Awwwards to find what to avoid doing.

Interesting take.. I love going to that site because I want to see new things that push the limits of the browser. I would love the opportunity to build some of the sites that are showcased there, just to try new things. I don't think these types of sites are "broken" at all. Most of them work very nicely in my experience and use clever ways to hide load time or other negatives. I wouldn't ever use most of the cutting edge ideas in sites I build commercially because the sites I build are for a more mainstream audience that probably isn't tech savvy, so I keep it to the basics, but the awwwards stuff is still very cool to me.

I think the broken stuff the tweet refers to is all the online publishers with floating video ads, 50 tracking scripts, bloated pages, zero accessibility, etc on a page for a 500 word article

Post reply on HN