Ask HN: Where can one learn about boring web development?

If you want to learn web development today and you use Google—even with the “one weird trick” of appending ”reddit” to your searches—all you find are micro-services, serverless/lambdas, >1M react packages, >10M npm packages, and >100M tutorials of how to do yet another to-do list with MongoDB or Firebase or the amazing marvel that is using SSR/CSR with Vercel.

For the sake of over-simplification, let's call this exciting web development. Now, where can I learn about the other side of the spectrum?

Request:

Is there an insanely pragmatic website or book containing everything you need to know when creating production-ready (yet simple!) web applications?

I am talking about HTML5, CSS3, modern JS (do you even need it? and if so, how does simple javascript look like?); `cron` jobs; database persistence; difference/explanations of when to use bare-metal v. vps v. vm; what there is to know about reverse-proxying and load balancers and how to correctly setup and deploy those and so on?

also. loved your LISP pun in your about page for HN :-)

You are on the right track…. strive for simple.

That’s exactly what I aim for when doing web application development.

A React application uploaded to a static web server, talking to a plain old Linux server running a simple back end like nodejs or python, talking plain SQL to a Postgres server.

Do you want server-side rendered app or will your app require client-side processing?

Do you anticipate that the app will, at some point in the future, need to be scaled to multiple servers?

Once you answer these questions, then what boring tech stack to choose will become easier.

One example I will give you of a boring stack, but highly effective, that I know of. Postgres as DB, Wt toolkit for both JavaScript and without JavaScript for hybrid server-side/client-side rendering, and HAProxy for load balancing. That is it. Nothing else is required if you are developing a small to medium sized web project.