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How I build software quickly

evanhahn.com

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Re: How I build software quickly

#131

Post by Izkata »

gl-prod wrote: post #72
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #22

In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast. Here are some things I have learned: * Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot. Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Djan…

In Django, how do you create components well and handle user interactions?

It's been a long time (we've gone all React), but I remember doing reusable components with templatetags.

Re: How I build software quickly

#132

Post by williamdclt »

fhd2 wrote: post #53
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #22

In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast. Here are some things I have learned: * Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot. Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Djan…

Agree with almost everything, but Celery is pretty common in my Django projects. I don't like the complexity cost, but especially when using some PaaS for hosting, it's usually the least painful option. I kinda always start out thinking this time I'll manage without, and then I have a bunch of jobs triggered via HTTP calls running into timeouts. At that point it's either threads, cron jobs (tricky with PaaS) or Celer…

You can have a queue in your relational DB (example: https://github.com/pgmq/pgmq). It'll scale pretty far.

Re: How I build software quickly

#133

Post by jollyllama »

gl-prod wrote: post #72
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #22

In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast. Here are some things I have learned: * Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot. Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Djan…

In Django, how do you create components well and handle user interactions?

re:componenets Just use jinja templates.

Re: How I build software quickly

#134

Post by jollyllama »

kukkeliskuu wrote: post #22

In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast. Here are some things I have learned: * Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot. Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Djan…

Yes, my default strategies are quite similar. I would also add: pre-populate data where you can rather than relying on robust data entry by users.

Re: How I build software quickly

#135

Post by acedTrex »

benterix wrote: post #47
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #22

In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast. Here are some things I have learned: * Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot. Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Djan…

> Forget Kubernetes, Redis While I agree with you, these two are the boring tech of 2025 for me. They work extremely reliably, they have well-defined use cases where they work perfectly and we know very well where they shouldn't be used, we know their gotchas, the interest around them seems to slowly wane. Personally, I'm a huge fan of these, just because they're very stable and they do what they are supposed to do.

A lot of the conversation about "simplicity" with kubernetes ignores that there are MANY different distributions of k8s.

I would argue that k3s on a vm is not too much harder to setup than a normal reverse proxy setup. And the configs are a bit easier to find on a whim when coming back after months.

Obviously a full self hosted setup of k8s is pretty large task but in other forms its a competitive option in the "simple" area.

Re: How I build software quickly

#137

Post by oblio »

bbkane wrote: post #82
physicsguy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like Django a lot. I can get a working project up and running trivially fast. In my day job I work with Go and while it's fine, I end up writing 10x more code for simple API endpoints and as soon as you add query parameters for filtering, pagination, etc. etc. it gets even longer. Adding a permissions model on top does similar. Of course there's a big performance difference but largely the DB queries dominate…

Yes I really wish for something like Django for a statically typed language (maybe Spring? Haven't tried it). I'm writing a CRUD CLI ( https://github.com/bbkane/enventory/ ) partly to practice doing it in Go, and while I'm mostly happy with the resulting code, theres just a whole lot of it. At least it's simple enough that I can trust LLMs to ok jobs with detailed prompts (example: https://github.com/bbkane/enventory…

You mention Django, but these days, are you using the full Django experience or are you mostly writing REST APIs?

In Java land a very nice and much lighter weight framework is Dropwizard: https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard

It's basically a sort of All-Stars collection of Java libraries, nicely packaged and with some nice conventions.

Towards the more servless route route there's Micronaut: https://micronaut.io/

Re: How I build software quickly

#138

Post by vbezhenar »

aatd86 wrote: post #40
physicsguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an almost pathological resistance to using anything that might be described as a 'framework' in the Go community in the name of 'simplicity'. I find such a blanket opinion to be unhelpful, what's fine for writing microservices is less good for bootstrapping a whole SaaS app and I think that people get in a bit too much of an ideological tizz about it all.

I don't think anyone would advise to do everything from scratch all the time. It's mostly about libraries vs opinionated frameworks. No one in their right mind would say: just use the standard library but I've seen it online. That discourse is not helping. I think people get this miscontrued on both sides. A set of reusable, composable libraries would be the right balance in Go. So not really a "framework" either. I…

> No one in their right mind would say: just use the standard library but I've seen it online. That discourse is not helping.

I would say that.

The most important thing about standard library is its stability. You won't ever need to touch code that works with standard library. It's finished code. Other than bug fixes, of course.

Third-party libraries is a very different thing.

They gets abandoned all the time, so now you're left with burden. You either need to migrate to another library, maintain that abandoned library or live with huge chunk of code that might be vulnerable.

They gets changed often enough, as their developers probably not so careful about backwards compatibility, compared to core language developers.

Third-party library is a liability. Very rarely its source code is an ideal fit to your application. Often you'll use 10% of the library, and the rest is dead weight at best, vulnerability source at worst. Remember log4shell? Instead of using standard logging code in Java, some developer decides to pull log4j library which is very nice to use, has lots of features. It can even download and execute code behind your back, very featureful.

Of course I'm not advocating to rewrite the world. This is insane. Some problems are just too big to solve by yourself. I also should note, that different ecosystems have different approaches to the language library and overall library culture. JS is terrible, while Go is not that bad, but it's not ideal either.

But my absolutely 100% always approach is to use standard library first and foremost. I won't use third-party library just to save few lines of code or make code more "beautiful". I prefer dependency-free boring repetitive code any day.

And if I'm using third-party library, I'm very picky about its stability and transitive dependencies.

It also depends on kind of company. My experience has always been: you write some service, you throw it at production, it works for the next 20 years. So you want this code to be as self-contained as possible, to reduce "chore" time with dependency management. Perfect application is a dependency-free software which can be upgraded by changing "FROM" line in Dockerfile. It is stable enough that you can trust CI do that.

Re: How I build software quickly

#139

Post by hamdouni »

jimbokun wrote: post #121
hamdouni wrote: post #39

When possible, I try to use real data for both volumetry and heterogeneity testing. It helps reveal unknowns in the problem space that synthetic data might miss.

This is very important and requires some foresight when the real data is personally identifiable information, private health information, etc. It's possible, but requires designing a safe way to run pre-production code that touches production data. Which in practice means you better be sure you're only doing reads, not writes, and running your code in the production environment with all the same controls as your prod…

You are right. I have a pre-production environment with a copy of production data and a script that scramble names and personal infos.

Re: How I build software quickly

#140

Post by porridgeraisin »

tempay wrote: post #118
nakovet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forget Celery How do you do background job processing without Celery? Every app/website I ever developed required some sort of background job processing, for Python I use Celery, Rails I use Sidekiq, Node.js I use Faktory. One of the biggest drawbacks (at least until a while ago) was that setting this up had to be a hacky webhook call to your own app that allowed up to N seconds request/response.

I've had success with a boring event loop which looks at the state of the system and does all the background work. It's simple to implement and much easier to manage failing tasks that need manual intervention to stop failing. It also makes it easy to implement batching of work as you always know everything that needs to be done in each loop. I also have multiple celery applications, but I wouldn't recommend it for s…

> boring event loop ... state of the system ... background work

Can you explain what you mean?

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