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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

#191

Post by prox »

claytongulick wrote: post #88
xwolfi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is surprisingly not true, have you tried ? When you start from scratch you realize you have a tiny minuscule surface and securing that very small hole is much easier than say... fixing the log4j 20th level transitive dependency of your giant Spring Framework that was secretly able to interpret random input from logs or someth. Especially if all you wanted was to show a quick html output. It's incredibly common t…

I'm living this right now. It's why when I have greenfield I do vanilla web components, with a little lit-html sprinkled in for fast rendering. I've seen so many developers complain about how complex vanilla web components are, and they'll turn around and do React / Vue / Angular and Redux or (shudder) rxjs, etc... I just don't get it. Like, if you need reactivity... Stick a render call into the setter of a plain old…

I am in front end webdev, and a lot of time I have had design colleagues that came up with crazy paid solutions for something as simple as a pop up. When I overheard and mentioned I could implement that in 2 hours tops it was a bit of a no brainer. The pure design folks often don’t know the tools or what’s possible.

To this day I just do mysql/php/js and simple ajax calls for a lot of solutions. Most clients are in the 100k-500k of hits and it works fine.

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

#192

Post by jerrre »

adamauckland wrote: post #162
onion2k wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows, and someone says it can easily handle n+m rows with x memory … This is a good example of how devs get things wrong. The argument between which database to use because you might hit the row limit has zero benefit to the user. It's devs wanting to avoid future work to migrate from one database to another; a…

Long time ago we ran several large insurance websites, fairly standard SQL Server backend. Once day I got into work and a slightly panicky dev said "We need to change the primary key on all the tables" It was using an int and at the current rate of data entry, was going to blow the maximum record number in a couple of days.

you could take this anecdote as a proof for how rarely these things happen

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

#193

Post by dist1ll »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #180
strken wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is different. Let's say you use a basic HTML Golang app backed by SQLite and replicated to a secondary with Litestream, all running on cheap bare metal ARM servers, and therefore your website is simple, usable, never goes down, and costs $20/month to run. I have no idea if this is actually good, but let's agree that there's some idealised system out there that would be a lot better than what we h…

> because they have nothing better to point to. Well - they do. For example, HN is running on a simple bare metal machine, with another one waiting for emergency.

Do you have a source for that?

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

#194

Post by prox »

aranchelk wrote: post #29

> Everybody seems to have an opinion on how you do your web dev and how websites and web apps should be structured. It’s true and it leads to many annoying unproductive arguments, IMO the reason is a fundamental lack of a scientific mindset in evaluating techniques and tooling. We don’t have theories or testable hypotheses, we have opinions. On one level I like and agree with the author’s idea that results are what r…

And still a lot of devs I have met haven’t read About Face : Essentials of Interaction Design. It’s a must read in my book to structure around a project. You don’t have to copy paste it’s ideas, but using its core features makes a project a whole lot smoother for both end user and devs.

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

#195

Post by foobarbaz33 »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #166
adamauckland wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago we ran several large insurance websites, fairly standard SQL Server backend. Once day I got into work and a slightly panicky dev said "We need to change the primary key on all the tables" It was using an int and at the current rate of data entry, was going to blow the maximum record number in a couple of days.

Must have been in the Jerassic period of MS SQL Server primary keys...

If you choose a 32-bit integer for your PK it can only address about ~4 billion records. That was true 1000 years ago, and will be true forever until a black hole swallows everything and changes the laws of reality.

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

#196

Post by prox »

abc_lisper wrote: post #75
aranchelk wrote: post #29

> Everybody seems to have an opinion on how you do your web dev and how websites and web apps should be structured. It’s true and it leads to many annoying unproductive arguments, IMO the reason is a fundamental lack of a scientific mindset in evaluating techniques and tooling. We don’t have theories or testable hypotheses, we have opinions. On one level I like and agree with the author’s idea that results are what r…

This is a wonderful comment! There is missing descriptions of things, the quality, the metrics to use when describing such things and we, the users of those said tools end up spending a lot of time going through bad documentation and learning things by practice. For a trade that pushes the digital frontier to everything it touches, the learning is surprisingly analog.

Read the book About Face : Essentials of Interaction Design, it’s a great resource on design and make projects around interaction as the title suggests.

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

#197

Post by deergomoo »

mb7733 wrote: post #101

>I’m hard-pressed to name more than a handful of web apps that I would say are genuinely good with no major flaw. >Content websites are a different matter. A static or server-rendered content website with adequate typography and semantic markup is generally going to do its job pretty well. I feel the exact opposite. Most web-based applications are pretty incredible these days. It's the "content websites" that are ins…

It’s so bad now that an ad-blocker is rarely sufficient, because even without the ads every other paragraph is broken up by some autoplaying video or some callout to a different article.

In some cases I genuinely struggle to read an article without reader mode or an RSS reader that can scrape the full article.

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

#198

Post by pketh »

Hammershaft wrote: post #182
pketh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The header and footer, including the logo hide on mobile during scroll because mobile safari doesn’t send enough info to position them accurately during flicks. Are you seeing flickering on iOS or android?

Android using firefox, so I may be a serious outlier.

Ahh that makes sense, android has some known issues that I want to resolve this month so I’ll add these to the list - thanks!

(tracking in https://club.kinopio.club/t/bugs-on-android/346/13)

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

#199

Post by ratww »

simonh wrote: post #188
strken wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is different. Let's say you use a basic HTML Golang app backed by SQLite and replicated to a secondary with Litestream, all running on cheap bare metal ARM servers, and therefore your website is simple, usable, never goes down, and costs $20/month to run. I have no idea if this is actually good, but let's agree that there's some idealised system out there that would be a lot better than what we h…

>Discussing the technologies or patterns involved without building anything and especially without building a complete working product with your favourite elegant tool.... But surely, if anywhere, this is the place to talk to people who have built complete working system, are building them, and intend to build more of them. This isn't a forum for a bunch of undergrads chatting about stuff they just learned in college…

> If the app becomes hugely popular, needs to serve massive volumes of data and sync across thousands of instances, well, it won't

This argument is so overused for justifying any kind of complexity that it would border on comical if it weren't causing so many issues in our industry.

There is absolutely no guarantee that the MongoDB + Kafka will also work with the hypothetical "massive volumes of data" you're talking about. Those two tools aren't set-and-forget: they require fine tuning and a good architecture to begin with. Ironically, I've seen plenty of cases where MongoDB couldn't handle the production load and had to be put behind some Varnish or Nginx disk cache (ironically bringing it closer to the SQLite app example).

But we don't even have to go that far: depending on the situation, there is a huge chance that the hypothetical app won't see "massive amounts of data" anyway. And if it does, there's an also massive chance that it won't happen overnight, so there will be time to build more. And if we get there, the SQLite app can just be bumped up to PostgreSQL or something similar, which scales vertically beautifully, or some other relational DB that scales horizontally.

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

#200

Post by ratww »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #180
strken wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is different. Let's say you use a basic HTML Golang app backed by SQLite and replicated to a secondary with Litestream, all running on cheap bare metal ARM servers, and therefore your website is simple, usable, never goes down, and costs $20/month to run. I have no idea if this is actually good, but let's agree that there's some idealised system out there that would be a lot better than what we h…

> because they have nothing better to point to. Well - they do. For example, HN is running on a simple bare metal machine, with another one waiting for emergency.

And the fun part is that traffic coming from HN routinely causes websites to crumble under load.
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