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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

#61

Post by cpursley »

johnisgood wrote: post #17
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?

I intentionally avoided using a framework mainly to keep my code simple, and because the framework was too inflexible and I could not achieve what I wanted to.

So you then ended up building your own half baked of a … wait for it … framework, without even realizing it. Nothing wrong with that, it can be fun - just depends on if your goals are shipping or playing around.

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

#62

Post by Scarblac »

superasn wrote: post #38

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.

I always see this sentiment here but I just havent experienced any of it in 14 years with the Django ORM.

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

#63

Post by victorbjorklund »

brabel wrote: post #53
iLoveOncall wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither do your dependencies. Unless the maintainer somehow hacks into your server and updates them for you?

People in web development tend to allow dependencies to auto-update. It’s kind of a necessary evil in that the alternative is to do it only manually and then falling behind on security vulnerabilities updates and potentially getting hacked.

But by that argument, if you try to write all of the code doing the functions just by yourself and not bring in any dependencies, and that code is now five years old and you haven't touched it for five years, you might have some security vulnerabilities too.

It's not like you are always writing better code than the open source projects are. Unless you are one of the best developers in the world, then sure, then that might work, but for the rest of us, we are probably not guaranteed to ever write code that is 100% bug free for five years.

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

#65

Post by rglullis »

lmpdev wrote: post #35
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…

If the problem you are trying to solve is "I need to put content online and have a storefront for my product", there are plenty of hosting providers who will happily take care of all the headache from Wordpress for less than $10/month.

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

#67

Post by fragmede »

bubblyworld wrote: post #21
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically they’re saying implicitly to be principled about adopting frameworks and other dependencies, evaluating whether they’re needed for one’s project before adopting them. It’s a pretty thought provoking post, even if it may be too subtle for some folks.

No need for the random snark? I mean, again, we're in extremely obvious territory here. Just doesn't seem appropriate for hacker news front-page (to me).

What makes their random snark any better than your original comment though? There was no need for you to come in and say that you don't see any value here. If you don't see any value here, just move on to the next post.

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

#68

Post by johnisgood »

epolanski wrote: post #37
kome wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is why you can include a header.html, nav.html, and footer.html if you so wish! There are many ways to do this. :P Depends on your use case.

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

#69

Post by johnisgood »

cpursley wrote: post #61
johnisgood wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I intentionally avoided using a framework mainly to keep my code simple, and because the framework was too inflexible and I could not achieve what I wanted to.

So you then ended up building your own half baked of a … wait for it … framework, without even realizing it. Nothing wrong with that, it can be fun - just depends on if your goals are shipping or playing around.

Yes I did, but it serves only one purpose, it is not a general framework, and it is much more minimal. The "framework" is not intended to be used by anyone. The project is, but not as a dependency.

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

#70

Post by Bigpet »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #56

Honestly, I don't agree with the mindset that frameworks and build steps should be avoided at all costs. Of course, you shouldn't pull in unnecessary NPM dependencies—that's just common sense. But using a compilation step or a framework can save you a lot of time and effort. For example, if you use a framework like Astro, you get a lot of functionality out of the box. If you try to do everything by hand, you end up c…

I don't think you're arguing against anything that was said in that post. There was never an "at all cost". The author was hedging even in the headlines ("indiscriminately", "before you know you need one" and "always, always").
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