There should be a threshold to adopt new technology, with dead focus on the deliverables. Chasing the fad is endlessly tiring and costly.
XML is the future
11–20 of 408 posts
Re: XML is the future
#12Lovely, being from the generation that predated OOP hype, it was a great read and I sign it.
Re: XML is the future
#13In my opinion, one of the worst was things was going from servers to serverless for web apps. Vercel (formerly Zeit) made a complete switch from servers to serverless for hosting and Next.js. Everyone jumped in without realizing just how much more complicated serverless architectures are compared to servers. 1. Having your APIs as lambdas now means you can't simply connect to a Postgres/MySQL without setting up a ded…
The problem are the business agrements that they are putting in place, like with Sitecore where now Vercel/Next.js are the bless way to do CMS frontends, with .NET being left behind.
So it is either Vercel/Next.js with the out-of-the-box development experience, or DIY integration with other stacks that are also "supported".
And they aren't the only ones following such hype cycle.
Re: XML is the future
#14I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…
Completely anecdotally, but the most productive I've ever been in a company has been was a company in 2016-2019 who was on a monolith .ENT Framework with no kube/container setup at all.
Sure, it felt like absolute chaos some days, but I"ve never felt more productive and in a flow as then, mainly because we weren't chasing the latest and greatest thing but focusing on what's working for us and perfecting it.
Re: XML is the future
#15I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…
Completely anecdotally, but the most productive I've ever been in a company has been was a company in 2016-2019 who was on a monolith .ENT Framework with no kube/container setup at all. Sure, it felt like absolute chaos some days, but I"ve never felt more productive and in a flow as then, mainly because we weren't chasing the latest and greatest thing but focusing on what's working for us and perfecting it.
The sad thing is that in many cases working on such a system is a career killer. Nobody wants to hire you. Some years ago a colleague and I realized that our company wouldn’t hire us judging from the job descriptions because we worked on systems that had been working for years but weren’t shiny. Since then I always something new to every project. Not because it makes sense but because it’s good for the resume. Other groups are even worse. Three devs writing 13 micro services on Kubernetes for maybe a thousand users ever.
Re: XML is the future
#16I really love this review of the past 20 years. It gets to the heart of the hype/FOMO cycle that's driven so many of these stacks to short-lived superstardom, and then quickly into irreversible technical debt. I have never really understood this. My favorite comment I ever got on a coding board when I was debating the pros and cons of building my next project in the trendy platform of the day was
>> STFU, go out and make web.
Re: XML is the future
#17I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…
> Look I'm not even complaining. But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. We just keep changing and changing the same things again and again because that's the new way to do. Big distraction. Destroys your workflow. Forget about all the util scripts you wrote last 6 months being useless.
Here's how I stay sane -- I focus on the changes. For the technologies that you noted, here are some good questions that come to mind to set them in my brain:
- What's the difference between CGI scripts and Serverless?
- What's the difference between Terraform and Ansible?
- What's the difference between a Bash script and a Makefile ? Is one more general than the other? Does one have a considerably better interface than the other?
All the solutions look the same, but the distinctions between them (even at a relatively surface level) are what help to actually tell things apart and stop the feeling of endless churn.
I think of it this way -- unlike other fields because the fruits of our research are immediately usable and almost zero-cost, we're given a front seat to the frontier of experimentation. It's a water hose, and you have to determine which streams are worth turning on/off, bottling for later.
Re: XML is the future
#18In my opinion, one of the worst was things was going from servers to serverless for web apps. Vercel (formerly Zeit) made a complete switch from servers to serverless for hosting and Next.js. Everyone jumped in without realizing just how much more complicated serverless architectures are compared to servers. 1. Having your APIs as lambdas now means you can't simply connect to a Postgres/MySQL without setting up a ded…
Just want to comment on the first two points as a vercel fan (1) pooling becomes the solution very early. You get massive speed benefits by keeping a connection open. Hitting connection limits is too easy without it. I feel like a push towards pooling is fine because it has great benefits for scale, speed and reliability. Services like Supabase have connection pooled postgres by default even in their free tier. (2) n…
>nextjs server side data fetching is an amazing feature that deserves it's place in future of web development
It was a thing in the past too. It's how almost all a CGI and PHP sites worked.
Re: XML is the future
#19I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…
I've watched this happen to so many coders in the land where people write code for companies that sell code. Personal advice: Write code for any other kind of company. They're much more resistant to fads. They don't care how you accomplish the new feature. They just want to get it done. And they certainly don't want to change their stack, ever, although in a new project you'll have more flexibility to pick the right tools than you would in a software company that's obsessed with the newest thing.
Re: XML is the future
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely anecdotally, but the most productive I've ever been in a company has been was a company in 2016-2019 who was on a monolith .ENT Framework with no kube/container setup at all. Sure, it felt like absolute chaos some days, but I"ve never felt more productive and in a flow as then, mainly because we weren't chasing the latest and greatest thing but focusing on what's working for us and perfecting it.
The sad thing is that in many cases working on such a system is a career killer. Nobody wants to hire you. Some years ago a colleague and I realized that our company wouldn’t hire us judging from the job descriptions because we worked on systems that had been working for years but weren’t shiny. Since then I always something new to every project. Not because it makes sense but because it’s good for the resume. Other…
After 20+ years of maintaining what amount to monoliths and services, I wonder whether I'd be hirable if I had to find a job at some big tech company. But I think the problem-solving ability you need to manage server clusters you built yourself translates into the ability to handle whatever their cloud junk looks like. Hopefully I'm never in that position, though, because I would absolutely hate a job like that.