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How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#31

Post by Cthulhu_ »

judge123 wrote: post #5

The problem isn't the tool or the dependency—it's the developer's temptation to over-engineer. We grab a framework because we lack the discipline to keep something simple. Is self-control in coding just a lost art now?

> Is self-control in coding just a lost art now?

Yes; a lot of people don't code because they need to make something work, they code for the joy of it. When the software they need to write is boring or solved - like another CRUD app, front- or back-end - instead of picking the boring and easy to build and comprehend languages and frameworks, they will make it interesting for themselves. Learn a new language, framework, or design paradigm; follow whatever is trending at the moment, etc.

A lot of new software is over-engineered from the start. A lot of that is cargo cult as well, e.g. big companies use microservices in their custom k8s cluster, therefore we should use microservices in our custom k8s cluster too.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#32

Post by bubblyworld »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #26
bubblyworld wrote: post #10

I don't see the value in posts like this. It's just a random list of things that can go wrong in software projects, with no discussion of trade-offs at all. Where's the engineering?

> Where's the engineering? not every problem has a technical solution.

These aren't "problems" with a "solution". These are software-level decisions that have both pros and cons.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#33

Post by rckt »

The post feels more like a rant, like the author has a beef with some sort of a project or a client. Even a static blog is easier to manage with tools rather than writing it in pure HTML.

I have my personal website running on svelte. When I decided to have a blog, I quickly came up with a solution to use markdown to html converter and just added a couple of routes to existing setup and voila, the blog is up and running. I don't care that it depends on several packages. Publishing a post takes just a push to my repo.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#34

Post by zwnow »

blueflow wrote: post #30
zwnow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a business website, customers expect a clean site with good visuals and a great user experience. Unless you are as big as Amazon. Sadly overengineering things is a necessary evil nowadays. If I had the choice I wouldn't even build websites mobile friendly but well... got no choice.

Hey, customers are people too, and they can and will say "no", too. "good looking" doesn't do it when it cannot do basic things.

Customers will use the thing that feels best, if there's a different tool that offers more but looks bad, most customers won't swap. People will use what they are accustomed to.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#35

Post by lmpdev »

judge123 wrote: post #5

The problem isn't the tool or the dependency—it's the developer's temptation to over-engineer. We grab a framework because we lack the discipline to keep something simple. Is self-control in coding just a lost art now?

Also the inverse though

Things like Wordpress sound super simple - you don’t even need to code!

But you do need to worry about managing an entire Apache server, managing a crappy database, hardcoding bullshit in PHP, cronjobs, cloud deployment and the fact that almost all “features” of it like plugins and themes etc are massive security vulnerabilities

I think the pitfall to avoid ITT is that there’s a single source of maintenance effort - there are likely many!

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#37

Post by epolanski »

kome wrote: post #6
epolanski wrote: post #2

On one hand I agree, one should approach issues as they come, but there's solutions that are hard to ignore such as the need for reusable fragments/components on different pages which already make a cry for dependencies. Even admitting one wants to go with bare bone web components authoring and maintaining them is expensive, requires lit or something. Thus, what's the solution? Some sort of templating? Again, you're…

> but there's solutions that are hard to ignore such as the need for reusable fragments/components on different pages which already make a cry for dependencies. honestly ctrl+c, ctrl+v of hand written html. and i'm cool as a cucumber.

Been there, done that. You implement just a header navigation change, now you're copy pasting across 12 different files.

But wait, now you want to add an active state to your navigation links, and you're manually changing the `class="active"` in 12 different files...

I could go on, it doesn't scale beyond triviality, albeit LLMs do help speeding up.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#38

Post by superasn »

Always use ORMs and then spend the next year debugging N+1 queries, bloated joins, and mysterious performance issues that only show up in prod.

Migrations randomly fail, schema changes are a nightmare, and your team forgets how SQL works.

ORMs promise to abstract the database but end up being just another layer you have to fight when things go wrong.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#39

Post by lmpdev »

bubblyworld wrote: post #10

I don't see the value in posts like this. It's just a random list of things that can go wrong in software projects, with no discussion of trade-offs at all. Where's the engineering?

Engineering is broader than just trade-offs

Broad heuristics can be very effective

We make decisions on many more datapoints than can be put into what sometimes amounts to a “for and against” list

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#40

Post by bapak »

aktuel wrote: post #23
jwpapi wrote: post #11

Im pretty sure that most packages and frameworks break less than your own code…

My own code doesn't break without me working on it.

Correct. It's broken by default because you're the only user and worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago. Probably wrote no tests for it.

Compare that to something like jQuery where all the edge cases have already been accounted for 10 years ago.

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