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I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

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

#61

html used to be a markup language for describing documents. now html is the gibberish output from some js build pipeline for wrapping 50 nested divs around some json values. why i hate web dev now: 1. what used to to take 1-3 steps now takes 10-20. trade-offs are absolutely not worth it for 90% of cases. 2. web dev has become low value, highly saturated and competitive field thanks to learn2code and low barrier.

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

#62
post #20

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

#63
post #45

What industry hasn’t changed tremendously since 2000? Look at Vulkan vs OpenGL 2. Or C++23 vs C++03. Or C# today vs C# in 2000. Or even Java today vs Java then. Or CPUs of today vs CPUs of 2000. Those gosh darned hardware engineers keep making this stuff overly complex! I find it funny when people from other domains complain about web development changing so quickly, when literally every other domain changes at about…

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

#64

Nothing's actually forcing you to do all these new trends. In fact, i'm currently working on a project and I'm using smalltalk/seaside and prototypejs for it

Knew Smalltalk would make its way into this. Saying as someone who loves it.

Is the issue really that old is now new, or is it that abstraction actually becomes a liability when it gets too deep? A lot of that old tech hit the sweet spot on abstraction without taking it too far.

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

#65
post #22

As an old web developer myself, that surfed pretty much all the waves (No JS, just a Perl or PHP monolith, then JS with XMLHTTPRequest, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, WebPack, Angular 1 and finally React) this argument doesn't make sense. No, there isn't a new JS framework every minute. No, you don't need to learn a new thing everyday. There's really only 4 framerworks (React, Vue, Angular & Svelte, in this order), they pr…

> There's really only 4 framerworks (React, Vue, Angular & Svelte, in this order), they pretty much do the same thing

For me it looks there are only 4 frameworks in that category. htmx in my eyes feels like a welcomed step back from those. Closer to what we used to do before (server-side html generation and such), but with a small twist. I have not really used it, but React etc. never felt good fit for me, personally.

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

#66
post #25
post #13

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…

I’m kinda in the same boat but lately (last few years) have been frustrated as I’ve ventured outside of web tech in seeking new things and found so many nice things in other platforms that its just sad to see “progress” trying to catch up innovation that has happened elsewhere. I’ve tried closure, elixir and a bit of haskell and all have so many great lessons that are yet to be learned elsewhere. After developing pro…

Speaking for myself personally, I think this is where standards have helped. Yes, new ideas spring about from frameworks and languages, but typically I see the standards cementing the good parts beyond them.

5-15 years ago I couldn't write native CSS. Today? I prefer it. It's improved to such a degree that I think most people aren't even aware of how much better it's gotten, because they escaped to Sass / CSS-in-JS for years.

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

#67
post #22

As an old web developer myself, that surfed pretty much all the waves (No JS, just a Perl or PHP monolith, then JS with XMLHTTPRequest, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, WebPack, Angular 1 and finally React) this argument doesn't make sense. No, there isn't a new JS framework every minute. No, you don't need to learn a new thing everyday. There's really only 4 framerworks (React, Vue, Angular & Svelte, in this order), they pr…

Right? Web development is orders of magnitude easier today than it was 20 years ago. We've standardized the web apis, we've standardized identity management and how to federate that management, we've standardized site interoperability, we've standardized site security - really, about the only choice you have now is which major framework do you want to use? And none of the above is still a choice.

Things are much, much easier today and work better for our customers. A true win-win.

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

#68
What is a saner specialty then? I’m getting tired of web dev because I’m getting too old to keep running on the treadmill.

But what’s a better specialty (more stable, doesn’t change every week, large number of opportunities)? iOS or Android development? Something else?

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

#69
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the past was primary browser incompatibility. That was why jQuery exists and was so successfull. Different render output with different css settings was an other problem. But, thank god, since IE dies, this problems are solved for 99% of all use cases.

I got into a web development a few years ago, and I am so... what would should I use? Almost euphoric that I never had to learn to work around IE6 or Internet Explorer in general; that web browsers mostly support the same feature set now (shame on Safari for still not supporting Ogg, and on Edge for not supporting AVIF), and ECMAScript 6 being widely available is a blessing.

In 2006, tech decisions were easy: shall I use jQuery or Prototype.js? PHP or ASP? Postgres or MySQL?

Nowadays, after the long decision process to go serverless I choose Cloudflare from the 13 best serverless frameworks and VueJS from the 30 frameworks they support.

So I choose SPA from the four ways to deploy VueJS. I chose TS over JS. SFCs thank you very much. Setup syntax please! Composition over options all the way.

I'm in the promised land! Types! Components! No server admin! No DB admin! Let's actually make something!

Trouble is, 18 months down the line, the commercial charts library I wanted to use is pretty much unusable with this setup. I've been through about eight dropdown menu libraries. How many person-hours were wasted with abandoned vuejs dropdown menus I wonder!?

It's been easier to write a desktop application to do the same thing in about two months.

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

#70
Just adding an option that worked for me: clojure, with its philosophy of making things simple [0] (as opposed to easy, as in "easy to get started but turns into a mess"). There are some exciting new developments out there (see rama [1] and electric clojure [2]), but the composability of the language makes these feel like additive ideas rather than "throw everything out and start from scratch".

[0] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137110 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34771771

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