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

blog.jim-nielsen.com

11–20 of 247 posts

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

#12

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?

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.

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

#13
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?

This seems to me to be exactly what the post is about.

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

#14

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…

PHP is actually a pretty good HTML preprocessor language. Not sure why it was blasted from this planet. Maybe because people abused it as a "rest" endpoint or backend, and burned themselves out from using the wrong tool for the job (even as php evolved to be pretty good backend for this too)

A small amount of PHP as a templater for simple raw HTML and JS segments is pretty nice.

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

#15
post #11

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

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.

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

#16

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?

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.

What about the trade off of being principled in the first place? I was much more principled back when I refused to use any programming language that wasn't based off of the lambda calculus, and I also got a lot less done as a result.

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

#17
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.

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

#18

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?

It is not random. All the mentioned problems come from a single source.

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

#19
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?

Certain tools, or rather: ecosystems encourage overengineering and overhyping more than others.
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