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Why must you laugh at my back end?

blog.pud.com

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Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#5

Post by acangiano »

In computing, there is an emphasis on the tools, rather than what you do with them.

It's worth noting that it's not limited to computing either. Countless amateur photographers spend their time discussing hardware, rather than techniques and other aspects that would benefit their craft to a much greater extent.

Personally, as much as I'm fascinated by the tools, I'm much more curious about what you do with them. So I'm always glad when I see someone succeed and create something useful with an odd stack of technologies. It reminds me to focus less on the tools and more on the creation process.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#8

Post by kaeluka »

dclaysmith wrote: post #4

The synchronizing with Dropbox is pretty clever. Had never thought of that. Probably some latency issues--it wouldn't suit all cases but definitely would be a simple fix to a few problems I've had in the past.

I use it for all of my dotfiles. A small script moves them to the ~/Dropbox/bckp/dotfiles and replaces them with a symbolic link. Also for my ~/scripts folder.

It's wonderful to have access to those in a matter of minutes if you are starting with a new machine...

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#9

Post by nhashem »

This is great. Seriously. I cut my teeth in the early 2000s writing the type of PHP code that would make your eyes bleed. Global variables everywhere. HTML/PHP/MySQL in the same file. Career-wise I ended up going down a backend/database developer path, so if I do anything with consumer-facing web applications, it's on my free time.

I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done is writing similar code to what I wrote in 2003. It's not quite as bad, but I continually succumb to doubt. Shouldn't I be using a framework? Wouldn't Python or Ruby be a better language to use now? Is it 'cheating' if I just throw these form elements in an HTML table? Shouldn't I be using something more scalable for the backend than a default installation of MySQL 5.1?

And yet, every time I try and address any of the above, it just gets frustrating to me. I have a limited of free time to work on this web application each week. So I want to spend that time actually DOING things with my web application, not just ramping up on learning some stuff so that I can maybe do some things a few weeks from now. This web application is getting a bit of traction with users. I always figured that I would eventually "code myself into a corner," and that making these suboptimal technology stack choices would result in me hitting some local maxima that would bite me in the ass and I'd have to basically rewrite everything.

But after reading this blog post, I feel a lot better about my choices. If this guy can make his web application work with the technology stack he prefers, then so can I.

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