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You can serve static data over HTTP

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Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#72
post #60

> It's not illegal to use static files and it does work. No, it doesn't. Maybe for your personal homepage with three hits per month, but even on a low traffic server, static files gave me headaches. 1) When two visitors write to the file at the same time, the data of one of the visitors will be gone. This can be solved by using lock files. This is a topic on its own (what happens when two processes both create a lock…

If there's writing going on, you're not using static files.

Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#74

Not from a modern developer. You need to jump down the rabbit hole of the history of solid and proven solutions. Indeed. I've noticed an increasing number of people who call themselves "developers" and appear to create software, but all they can do is follow step-by-step tutorials to glue together some massively bloated thing that they have absolutely no understanding of, much less the skills to debug it when somethi…

exactly that. I couldn't describe better.

Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#76
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not want them in your team maybe, but isn’t it really cool we reached a state where you can actually do this? Democratization of software engineering is a great good!

Democratization of software engineering means giving everyone the opportunity to learn. Not handing them a black box with a few instructions then sending them off to plow head first into a brick wall of insurmountable knowledge gaps so they give up.

Democratization of software means that more people than ever can make things. This is absolutely the case with software today. We have kids creating games with drag-and-drop visual programming languages. One developer can get a worthy full-stack prototype in front of an investor in a month (or less!), and these stories are gaining steam.

Soon we may have no-code solutions getting good enough to warrant broader adoption. No-code solutions are as black box as you can get, and it's also as anti-learning as you can get in terms of the underlying technology and its theoretical principles. But this is also an example of more people than ever making things.

Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#77

Not from a modern developer. You need to jump down the rabbit hole of the history of solid and proven solutions. Indeed. I've noticed an increasing number of people who call themselves "developers" and appear to create software, but all they can do is follow step-by-step tutorials to glue together some massively bloated thing that they have absolutely no understanding of, much less the skills to debug it when somethi…

Then how are these people getting jobs but not my more competent friend? Asking for friend.

Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#78

This technique of producing an “API” from directories of json generated by batch jobs and creative use of symlinks can be surprisingly effective. I wrote a simple program to transform a list of RSS feeds into a directory tree that I’ve been using for years as my feed reader API to great effect.

We do this at https://endoflife.date API, and it works quite well.

Re: You can serve static data over HTTP

#80
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glue together some massively bloated thing that they have absolutely no understanding of Welcome to the world of npm and supply-chain hell

To be fair, I would also say the mainstream IDEs have contributed to this situation to a certain extent, since they lower barrier of entry. That's a very good thing, but also sometimes bad. Here's what I mean. There's a difference between: * Using an IDE knowing what you want to do but you just like the convenience. You know what the IDE is doing for you, but you want your tool to do it for you quickly and get out of…

> I understand this is an inevitable consequence of lowering the barrier of entry and making programming more accessible, and it doesn't matter if we're talking about npm, IDEs, programming languages, or anything.

Pretty much this. Anybody new to the field will be using an IDE, it's extremely unlikely that someone new will be using vim/emacs. So IDE users will be a mix of newbies and experienced people, but since the field grew so much in recently, the number of newbies using IDEs will outnumber the experienced people using them. In contrast, people using vim/emacs will consist mostly of people with a lot of experience at this point.

So the average IDE user will be less experienced than a non-IDE user, but I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are using an IDE. I wouldn't attempt to pre-judge anyone's ability based on if they use an IDE or not.

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