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I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

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Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#41

Post by n4bz0r »

octodog wrote: post #36
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in the American workplace we’re expected to be casual and friendly with everyone while also being acutely aware of rank. So if your boss sends a silly meme, you might want to reply with another silly meme. But if you go over your boss’s head and send an unsolicited “hey ” email, you might still be in for repercussions. Just because everyone is on a first name basis and drinks beer together at happy hour d…

How are you supposed to address your boss's boss?

I suppose the point is that you aren't. You talk to your immediate superior instead. And then your boss does the same if he/she decides there is a talk to talk.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#42

Post by jackson1442 »

octodog wrote: post #36
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in the American workplace we’re expected to be casual and friendly with everyone while also being acutely aware of rank. So if your boss sends a silly meme, you might want to reply with another silly meme. But if you go over your boss’s head and send an unsolicited “hey ” email, you might still be in for repercussions. Just because everyone is on a first name basis and drinks beer together at happy hour d…

How are you supposed to address your boss's boss?

I think some places still expect you to use their honorific prefix and address them by their last name. Definitely a dying trend though.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#43

Post by melony »

I love web dev because the community is willing to address problems; engineering follows product in a tight feedback loop. Developer experience becomes a target to optimize for, and not just the overall ROI. In almost every other CS/software field save for machine learning, reinventing the wheel is a privilege reserved for large corporations. If you ever worked in the embedded space (or talked to engineers who did) or even a non-IT industry, it is obvious that many fundamental protocols and technologies never changed since the days "their grandpappy did it". Web may move fast but the UX is constantly improving and the value delivered is increasing every day; there is a very good reason why people from almost every other industry is trying to get into software engineering.

Even if you don't like the current JS stack, there is nothing stopping you from pulling a Figma and building everything from scratch in WebAssembly, after all, game developers (before Unity) do it all the time. Show me a burnt-out web developer and I will show you ten hardware/mechanical/electronic engineers who would give their arms and legs for the ease of tooling and the large salary of web devs. You are being paid 6-7 figures to debug a bunch of UI code in a high level scripting language, and your biggest complaint is that the churn is too bad?

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#44

Post by rootusrootus »

Why are tech choices having such an impact on the experience to begin with? Aside from small apps, the web developer is just the guy making the magic happen, there should be an actual product owner somewhere who is making decisions on experience. It's up to the devs to make the experience happen, but poor design is a different problem than what framework you wrote the code in.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#45

Post by sidlls »

omarhaneef wrote: post #28

The author complains that developers argue about their tools and methods, insist on their favorite techniques, but produce (more) worse apps. Particularly for the amount of time and effort expended on developing the apps. The thing is: the debates aren’t naive. They’re exactly trying to workout the details. When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows…

The problem of which DB to use is one that can be figured out ahead of time with even modest attention to more rigorous engineering practice. But that’s not what webdevs the subject of this article do. They play guess-and-check games like they are 15th century engineers building a bridge, because they have hacker mentalities instead of engineer mentalities.

Not to mention the cult of celebrity and fad following in the industry.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#46

Post by jdougan »

travisgriggs wrote: post #40

> They keep encountering highly flawed websites or web apps and are assuming that regular web devs can do something about it. This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. I was excited over the last few decades to see the field of programmers swell. I have always loved the craft of good software development. I was…

If the dev pool of 2022 was like the dev pool of (for example) 1994, just larger, you would have been right. But the software goldrush came and attracted many more who were just in it for the money or just weren't as thoughtful. Scale matters, upscaling people is hard.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#47

Post by cmroanirgo »

lawgimenez wrote: post #39

I'm a little confused on the article. I remember developing web apps where I could just start a LAMP on my machine but times have changed and we should accept that everything is getting complicated. He should try mobile development, it's much more worse in my opinion. I'm a mobile dev fyi.

Agree. At this point I'm a little bewildered at what iOS and Android has brought to mobile development that wasn't already in j2me, at least in a preliminary way.

At the start of iOS it was "look, pretty icons" and "no more permission popups". But, most platforms had icons anyway, and all the apps now get the annoying popups for the same set of permissions (except for networking) that was the bug bear of j2me (at the time). iOS and Android got rid of all the permission boxes for a better UX.

So, we're left with the expectation of a seamless web. But it never occurs because of endless permission issues, of which the platforms try to reduce by providing a one-size-fits-all cloud solution (iCloud and Google), both of which allow relentless advertising & gamification of our personal information. It's so bad that governments all over are racing toward digital "identities".

I'll take the simplicity of j2me any day thankyou. The development environment was GBs smaller and faster and the problem set is pretty much the same. At least with j2me there was the idea of responsibility to data usage (I generally only get 3G, even now) as opposed to 40MB apps that download 100's more. All the apps I developed during that time were offline first and synced when available.

The real complexity I see is in the consumption of video and hi res images as well as the interaction with other apps (eg share menu). Unless I'm seriously mistaken, everything else was in j2me (even opengl). All the other complexity is in the tools we have these days & endless rhetoric on which ungainly monster is better than the next.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#48

Post by cyanydeez »

omarhaneef wrote: post #28

The author complains that developers argue about their tools and methods, insist on their favorite techniques, but produce (more) worse apps. Particularly for the amount of time and effort expended on developing the apps. The thing is: the debates aren’t naive. They’re exactly trying to workout the details. When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows…

YAGNI is what you're talking about, and it's easy to choose tech that makes you worse

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#49

Post by nomdep »

conartist wrote: post #5

Totally agree we should be talking about great web and native experiences rather than the tech that sits under them. Whenever I see people arguing about frameworks I think of the midwit meme where the opposite ends just use what they know.

Arguing about framework is people talking about great developer experience

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#50

Post by layer8 »

jasonpbecker wrote: post #22

Just an observation: the native apps that are better are built on massive, proprietary frameworks developed by platform owners. In some ways, most of the web frameworks are trying to be the One True Web Platform Framework that similarly makes it possible for developers to make better web apps the way that say, AppKit or UIKit makes that possible on Apple's platforms. So I'm left wondering, did the frameworks fail or…

Until or unless something equivalent to those platform frameworks becomes part of the browser, the situation won’t change significantly. The fact is that the current interface between web app and browser, that is, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and WASM), is highly inadequate for productivity applications.
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