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

blog.jim-nielsen.com

81–90 of 247 posts

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

#81
If you took this seriously you'd write everything in assembly to avoid dependancy on a language that will one day break. Picking a set of dependancies that are built on well reasoned, clean abstractions is a far better apporach than rolling your own solution to every problem you encounter.

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

#82

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.

we have AI that scans for any potential query N+1 right now

people forget how sql works??? people literally try to forget on how to program

more and more programmer use markdown to "write" code

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

#83
post #77
post #71

> Always, Always Require a Compilation Step And from the linked post on the same website. > if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Very (very, very) few large projects use plain JS (instead of TS) these days. Let's stop acting like all these people don't know what they're doing. This post is probably applicable to selected tiny and small projects. And…

OK, but that's essentially "argument by authority" + "everyone is doing it". They certainly have their reasons and they definitely aren't stupid, but it would be more useful to know what those reasons are and in what scope they are applicable.

It's better than the OP article. The OP article is "argument by I-says-so".

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

#85
post #77
post #71

> Always, Always Require a Compilation Step And from the linked post on the same website. > if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Very (very, very) few large projects use plain JS (instead of TS) these days. Let's stop acting like all these people don't know what they're doing. This post is probably applicable to selected tiny and small projects. And…

OK, but that's essentially "argument by authority" + "everyone is doing it". They certainly have their reasons and they definitely aren't stupid, but it would be more useful to know what those reasons are and in what scope they are applicable.

Why types are good (even essential) for large projects has been documented quite extensively. Internet pushed JS to the forefront and as projects increased in scope and ambition, types became unavoidable.

More recently, see how there's a strong push towards types in Python. AI/ML is to Python what the internet was for JS. And types are here.

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

#86
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 make choices one of that is build a website in php. I do things from scratch so it involved learning the server, the setup (security/docker/podman), the stack (php/js/css/html). My limits made me do things. The code was and is ugly. Everything is a mess. There is no routing my URLs are pretty because of nginx rewrites. My limits make design choices like no user data because I cannot be sure about security. Once it is up and running you look at things like bootstrap to learn basics of css. Then you want it all gone because you learned the way of css.

I have no problem with sql but an ORM makes what I know about sql very ugly.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is API breakage. Does your 5 year old NextJS project still work after npm update? Probably not! What about your simple Go server or FastAPI server. Probably yes.

So don't run npm updates because sure then you have the security risks that you have some old code and that is five years old and hasn't been worked on for five years and you also have you missing out on new functions and optimizations. However if you have a five-year-old project that you handwritten everything by yourself you probably have a lot of security issues there too assuming that you are using complicated fu…

Yes run updates of course. The question is how much of a headache you want.

You can:

Use Next.js (frequently changing lots of transitive deps, suffers from Node ecosystem churn too)

Roll your own framework

OR (FANFARE....)

Use simpler arguably more professional tools. That 10 year old .NET MVC site. Guess what. Still works. Still secure.

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

#89
I have a good one(?):

1. be multiple developers on the same project.

2. for each developer, use your own tools and techniques, insist on only handling those parts of the site that you did with your tools, and insist on never fully understanding those remaining parts of the site the other devs did.

This will allow for all sorts of fun, including:

- A multiple inconsistent implementations of the same thing

- B even better, those multiple inconsistent implementations affecting and breaking each other!

One you have this going, there are some easy bonus pickings: Whenever B happens, "fix" it with weird extra incancations inside your own toolset, cleverly avoiding any attempt at (2) above.

If you succeed at this, several developers can, combining these techniques to sabotage and trigger a veritable pinball game of strange breaking effects.

Note: CSS is a great place to start this game!

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