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I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

thecodist.com

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Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#11

Post by scastiel »

The web development might not be perfect, and yes it’s evolving very fast, but it is not worse than it used to be.

I’m a bit disappointed in the article. With the title I expected to read something about development that is not web (system, embedded…), and it made me curious. Sadly it isn’t; the author is criticizing an ecosystem they left a while ago, and regret not to be able to keep up with it. Pretty normal, isn’t it?

It’s very easy not to be able to keep up with something you’re not a part of anymore. We shouldn’t expect things to stay the same forever. It’s okay to take a step back and reflect on how things are (yes, maybe web dev becomes too complicated in certain ways), but it’s hard to judge when you’re completely out of it (the author stopped web development “in 2009”).

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#12

Post by dangus »

I think the article sidesteps the underlying issue with programming for a company.

Programming is way closer to cleaning bathrooms or working the checkout line at the grocery store than most programmers are willing to admit. It's an endless slog to solve the same problems for the same companies over and over.

Your code really has no value without a business solution. A website or an app or some code is just an implementation detail, and it has no value by itself. It can lose value in an instant if something else comes around or the underlying problem that it set out to solve disappears.

There's nothing wrong with web development today. It's a tool for a job and it does its job.

I think a lot of developers have tunnel vision on what they actually do for a living. I don't really think it's the greatest gig. I think a lot of other corporate roles are more lucrative and easier. For example, fart out some business word salad for your MBA classes, get your degree (this is way easier than an engineering undergrad), and convince someone to hire you in a strategic business role.

You can't even really screw it up at a lot of companies, there's no need to be competent, the programmers and other grunt workers do all the actual work.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#13

Post by snide »

I'll be the contrarian. I'm in my mid 40s and have been designing / developing for the web now for 25 years professionally. I built my personal site in Astro, Svelte and Xata because they were all new technologies and I enjoy learning new things. The fact that things change so much is actually a reason I've remained so excited about my work for so long. I love the learning part of things so much, that when I'd grown into being a corporate executive I generally missed that daily churn of learning and eventually gave it all up so that I could take an IC job to code again.

Is this good for business? Probably not. Is it fun for me? Absolutely. Sometimes the road calls to you more than the destination. We're all wired a little different.

Side note. I love the author's art and couldn't find a place to purchase it.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#14

Post by Cthulhu_ »

I've been doing web development for the past 15 years or so, with the odd sidestep to mobile, currently React Native, but ten years ago I did some native iOS. I had the opportunity to do native iOS again recently, just a POC to add widgets to our app. On the one side, it was great, the tooling is great, super previews, etc. On the other, it's a lot of fidgeting to get it to work, but then, I hadn't had the opportunity to work with SwiftUI yet.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#16

Post by jmfldn »

dangus wrote: post #12

I think the article sidesteps the underlying issue with programming for a company. Programming is way closer to cleaning bathrooms or working the checkout line at the grocery store than most programmers are willing to admit. It's an endless slog to solve the same problems for the same companies over and over. Your code really has no value without a business solution. A website or an app or some code is just an implem…

I think you have a point. The thing is, I'm weirdly OK with labouring away at the coalface. It's hard work, it's more toil and drudgery than people admit, but I'd rather that than finding the white collar 'cheat codes' that allow me to skive off.

It helps to work on a product that you're into, or believe in, if you're lucky enough to find such a thing. I think one of the secrets is to become a product-centric engineer, and focus more energy on understanding the domain and what the business needs.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#17

Post by progx »

Starting a fresh new (internal) project in our company, no specs, no borders, we can use any JS lib, framework, tool, whatever.

Now we stay like a kid in front of a candy shop and don't know what to choose.

Anything has pros and cons, but nothing really convinces us. It seems that all candies look great but taste like spoiled fish.

We are a small team and we don't have the time to update the app with every new version of a framework.

We stepped back and looked at our internal tools, which needed the least time of work for updates etc. and we currently think we use no framework. Only a really really simple one. That would possible need more time to build an app, but saves a lot to maintain the app. This tool would be used for the next 10 years (ok 20 years in reality).

Our oldest internal tool is 22 years old (manages customers, projects, domains, servers, etc.), got a little update some months ago to work with newest browser, update to newer php-version and that all within only 2 weeks. 2 weeks! That is today not enough time for a modern build setup ;-)

10 years ago, non of the current JS frameworks exists, or you have to do so much upgrade work to maintain you apps. 20 years ago? OMG unbelievable. Now think 10 or 20 years in the future. I think none of the current frameworks will then exists.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#18

Post by Cthulhu_ »

malfist wrote: post #5
DHPersonal wrote: post #3

I get the point the writer is making: web development is a mess. However, I also think that stepping off that treadmill can make one's impression of the field a bit skewed, because there is no longer an incentive of the writer to keep up with the nuances of the changes. Web frameworks do come and go, but they're also not that different from each other. New ones show up, but that doesn't mean that everyone flocks to t…

I don't know man, I've seen frameworks rise, gain massive adoption and then be abandoned as everyone moves to the next hot thing. I watched everyone adopt AngularJS and then have to migrated to Angular 2.0 and then everyone migrated to React. During this time, the backend folks wrote java services using SpringBoot and then migrated to SpringBoot and then when that wasn't abandoned, moved to SpringBoot. Web developmen…

It doesn't help that a lot of websites / apps have this tendency to "need" a redesign / rebranding every 5-10 years, which developers take as an opportunity to use the next great framework because the old app is an unmaintainable mess.

If anything, new frameworks should be simple to use.

I've had the misfortune to work in an Angular codebase last year, I could hardly make heads or tails from it; I'm sure there's good theory behind it, but it was far too complicated.

Currently working in React, and it's got the annoyances of hooks, callbacks, effects, etc; basically, you as a developer are responsible for a lot of rendering behaviour, using what looks like magic trickery. Don't get me wrong, I like the basics of React, but as soon as it goes beyond simple props it's starting to lose me. I heard Vue solved this better or more intuitively, but it's still a layer on top of JS/HTML.

In parallel I've been working in Go, and while it's wordy and frequently annoying (like when using the correct design patterns, you'll end up copying a database struct to a business logic struct to a HTTP API struct, it's boring, wordy and bug prone code), it's still much more of a joy to work in because there's very little indirection or friction.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#19

Post by Kerrick »

progx wrote: post #17

Starting a fresh new (internal) project in our company, no specs, no borders, we can use any JS lib, framework, tool, whatever. Now we stay like a kid in front of a candy shop and don't know what to choose. Anything has pros and cons, but nothing really convinces us. It seems that all candies look great but taste like spoiled fish. We are a small team and we don't have the time to update the app with every new versio…

10 years ago I was creating apps with Ember.js, which is still a current JS framework.

Re: I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

#20

Post by pupppet »

I don’t blame the tooling, there’s nothing stopping you from creating an old school PHP website.

I blame the audience. These JS frameworks and cloud-everything services exist to shave every possible millisecond off from the experience because we all have the attention spans of a goldfish now.

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