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Things that used to be hard and are now easy

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Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#111

Post by romaniv »

The general theme of this list is that technology gives us more and more hoops to jump through, then provides some trampoline to jump through them. We're supposed to be eternally grateful. I'm not. I want to focus on problem-solving, not masterfully using trampolines.

> SSL certificates, with Let’s Encrypt

Semi-mandatory SSL certificates weren't a thing on the web until fairly recently. Not managing them at all was certainly easier than managing them with Let's Encrypt, which has a lot of gotchas, requires tooling, knowledge and can suddenly break your website if something is off.

> Concurrency, with async/await (in several languages)

async/await usage is literally the main reason why my recent project is written in Go instead of C#. I like C#. I don't like Go. But dealing with all the gotchas of .NET Core async/await APIs drove me away.

Moreover, Erlang had a much more sane and powerful parallelism model way before async/await.

> Centering in CSS, with flexbox/grid

Again, like with SSL, this is technically correct, but generally incorrect. Centering in CSS has gotten much easier with flexbox/grid. However, centering in HTML only became hard because tables were abandoned as the layout mechanism. Sure, they're not "semantic". But we're talking about what became easier, right? Not about what became more ideologically correct, semantic, etc.

> Configuring cloud infrastructure, with Terraform

Again, there used to be no Cloud infrastructure to configure. Personally, I find Terrafrom annoying more than anything else.

> Setting up a dev environment, with Docker

As opposed to doing what? Keeping my dev environment simple is a constant battle and most of the time Docker is the weapon used by the other side. In 00s my dev environment was a text editor and some upload tool.

I haven't used PHP in well over a decade, but for my latest personal project I've decided to brush up on PHP 8.1. Despite awful syntax, I can do stuff by writing a handful of lines of code in a text editor. It's very refreshing. 100% focus on the outcome rather than tooling.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#112

Post by b3morales »

umvi wrote: post #54
theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

Logging into an online account on a computer you don't normally use when you don't have your phone. This can range from "had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops" to impossible if you haven't saved backup codes ahead of time (Google). My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android. We were trying to login on a r…

I can't really see this as the negative you imply it to be. This seems like complaining that you might get locked out of your house if you lose your keys. There are certainly better and worse forms of 2FA, but I would like more pervasive (well-implemented) account security, not less.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#114

Post by Too »

cm2187 wrote: post #64
wackget wrote: post #31

Eh... I'd argue against quite a lot of those being "easier" than doing things manually. Docker is a prime example. It's supposedly easier to spin up a docker container for a basic web server stack, but to be honest I'd rather install PHP/MySQL and an SSL certificate manually, rather than spend time finding a decent container from a trustworthy source, and then spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how and why it's be…

In .net, mandatory async/await for new API is also making things that were easy harder. Async introduces multithreading where there wasn’t, breaks call stacks (debugging harder), deadlocks in certain conditions but not others (asp or winform vs console), forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing, etc.

> forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing

Thank goodness for that. No more of UI suddenly freezing completely and stops accepting input just because internet connection is flaky. Async or other slow operations should not be running on the UI thread.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#115

Post by b3morales »

sofixa wrote: post #87
umvi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logging into an online account on a computer you don't normally use when you don't have your phone. This can range from "had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops" to impossible if you haven't saved backup codes ahead of time (Google). My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android. We were trying to login on a r…

That's why Google often prompt you for backup information - backup phone number, email address, which can be used to recover an account if you've lost your phone.

There are ways to provide backup factors without tying them to more personal information, however.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#116

Post by nerdponx »

lopis wrote: post #27

I really like that XKCD comic about identifying birds in a photo, so it's unfortunate that it didn't age that well. How could we rewrite that comic to today's tech? I was thinking something like: A: I want to create an app that scans good feedback of our brand online... B: there's a li rary for that, consider it done A: ... and understand if they are actually being sarcastic. B: I'm gonna need 5 years and a lab of ex…

It aged perfectly IMO. Maybe the timeline was a little bit off, but it did indeed take several years and a huge amount of effort by experts to make object recognition available "off the shelf".

And even then, problems can quickly escalate from "any programmer with a little experience can do it" to "we need a team of data scientists and data engineers".

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#117

Post by jcims »

kingcharles wrote: post #78
cm2187 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In .net, mandatory async/await for new API is also making things that were easy harder. Async introduces multithreading where there wasn’t, breaks call stacks (debugging harder), deadlocks in certain conditions but not others (asp or winform vs console), forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing, etc.

This is definitely true. Just trying to download a file can become an async chain hell-hole.. it's asyncs all the way down!

The pain in the chain is mainly in the main().

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#118

Post by smoe »

reidjs wrote: post #7

As someone who leans frontend, I find firebase and serverless (somebody else’s server) solutions really powerful for prototyping an idea or building a proof of concept. You can get something in front of your users tomorrow. I would second guess SaaS startups that start by building the infra/data models unless they’re going for a highly technical play (aerospace, hardware, etc) or already have a ton of market knowledg…

Agree with starting focusing on UI first. But haven’t seen a speed advantage at this stage of serverless vs a simple monolithic backend app with a bunch of endpoints. You can get something in front of users within hours. Either way allows you to overengineer and focus on the wrong thing.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#119

Post by vvanders »

antirez wrote: post #70

It's very hard to accept the statement that writing fast programs is now simpler with Go/Rust. I think that what happened is more like this: * With Go is now possible to write reasonably fast (not as fast as C) programs in a simpler way. That's great indeed, but is not exactly the above statement. * With Rust it is possible to write programs that have a speed that is comparable to the one of C programs, that are memo…

Reading the article and I didn't see writing fast Rust programs as easier listed(only Go). The callout was for sharing data between threads which I think is an area where Rust has the edge over other languages.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#120

Post by sillysaurusx »

vvanders wrote: post #119
antirez wrote: post #70

It's very hard to accept the statement that writing fast programs is now simpler with Go/Rust. I think that what happened is more like this: * With Go is now possible to write reasonably fast (not as fast as C) programs in a simpler way. That's great indeed, but is not exactly the above statement. * With Rust it is possible to write programs that have a speed that is comparable to the one of C programs, that are memo…

Reading the article and I didn't see writing fast Rust programs as easier listed(only Go). The callout was for sharing data between threads which I think is an area where Rust has the edge over other languages.

Why do you feel that way?
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