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Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

pagedraw.io

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Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#111

Post by PakG1 »

spyhi wrote: post #102
PakG1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the old days, customers would never be able to get their hands on video game prototypes. You had one shot. Today, it's obviously a bit different, though many companies still treat it like one shot anyway.

Yeah, but even in the old days the developers would still be prototyping. Internal stakeholders are still stakeholders, and it’s developers optimizing for things other than speed. Nintendo devs famously build nothing until Mario’s jump (the MVP) feels right.

Yeah, but my point was that once it was in a cartridge in a customer's home, there wasn't anything that the company could do to update it. They certainly didn't send their customers copies of the prototypes. Whether or not companies ate their own dog food doesn't change the crux of my point.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#112

Post by twic »

taneq wrote: post #91
cr0sh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I've always put it: "Steak before sizzle" Get something done and working, even if performance sucks. Then do your performance logging and optimizations. Don't attempt to pre-optimize, because you may make a good situation worse. That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Second thing I alway…

> "Steak before sizzle" I like it! > That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Exactly. "Avoid premature optimisation" doesn't mean "make it as slow as possible", it just means "use std::vector until it becomes an issue instead of hand-coding some arcane data structure in assembler".

Except that salespeople say "don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle!", so this could get confusing.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#113

Post by pjmlp »

PakG1 wrote: post #110
pjmlp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they would. Game studios were one of the first areas to care for UX. During the 80's and early 90's many kids got into games by starting as group testers after school.

At that point, they were insiders or even employees, not final customers, no? Games were released onto cartridges that couldn't be updated once the cartridges were manufactured and in the customer's hands.

Insiders if you will, studios would get the kids into a room to play test ongoing development.

It wasn't always the same group of kids.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#114

Post by taneq »

twic wrote: post #112
taneq wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Steak before sizzle" I like it! > That doesn't preclude selecting correct algorithms and such beforehand; ie - don't be stupid about it. But don't try to be clever before you know you need it, either. Exactly. "Avoid premature optimisation" doesn't mean "make it as slow as possible", it just means "use std::vector until it becomes an issue instead of hand-coding some arcane data structure in assembler".

Except that salespeople say "don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle!", so this could get confusing.

Isn't that the point, though? You sell the sizzle... but you can't deliver without the steak.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#115

Post by steve76 »

elcomet wrote: post #108
realusername wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the whole problem with web editors: - If they abstract a lot, you can target designers but then it inevitably produce unmaintainable spaghetti code because it does not know exactly where you are going - If you abstract it less, you can only target developers but what's the point for developers to use an UI when they have to know how to code in the first place?

That's true for now, but I believe we will get there eventually. Who is writing assembly code anymore ? You can argue that compilers produce unmaintanable spaghetti assembly code, which is certainly true. But almost no one will look at the assembly output. The next step we are currently in: a lot of new languages compile to C. And it produces absolutely unreadable code. But who wants to read and write C when you can…

C was fixed by adding another language, not trying to take away programming. It really is working at cross purposes. Write code without writing code, when you already know how to write code.

If there was an easier way, it will be put into the language. The bulk of it is avoiding teaching lessons which users need to understand.

There are security threats out there. It's one thing to prove concept. It's another thing to protect it against people trying to break it.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#116

Post by pier25 »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #39
pier25 wrote: post #31

We've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on. My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maint…

SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, and Elementor (a WordPress plugin) have all caught on. The first three are more than page-builders, but the page-builder is an important component. They're just not popular with the HN crowd.

Have caught on with pros or people that do not know HTML?

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#117

Post by spyhi »

PakG1 wrote: post #111
spyhi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but even in the old days the developers would still be prototyping. Internal stakeholders are still stakeholders, and it’s developers optimizing for things other than speed. Nintendo devs famously build nothing until Mario’s jump (the MVP) feels right.

Yeah, but my point was that once it was in a cartridge in a customer's home, there wasn't anything that the company could do to update it. They certainly didn't send their customers copies of the prototypes. Whether or not companies ate their own dog food doesn't change the crux of my point.

Yeah, but the original point you were responding to was endorsing the idea that “you should invest time in optimizing/performance last, and focus on making something people want to use first.” I’m saying your point that videogames have to be performant at the end is irrelevant to the point at hand because that’s exactly what the games industry does, they prototype without care to optimization to make something worth optimizing—i.e. something internal stakeholders reasonably believed there would be a market for.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#118

Post by jpochtar »

shubhamjain wrote: post #100
jpochtar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html is how we felt about Coffeescript + JSX

Frankly, picking a non-conventional language in order to associate yourself with "true hackers" is PG's least useful advice. I am not even sure if he would still agree today. Hackers use the language they are most comfortable with and that gets things done. Everything else is secondary. I wrote a blog post on the subject [1]. [1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2018/12/01/why-paul-graham-wrong/

Yeah we didn't do it for the hipster cred— we did it because I agree with PG that some languages are better than others, and Coffeescript is just better than Javascript.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#119

Post by twic »

taneq wrote: post #114
twic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that salespeople say "don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle!", so this could get confusing.

Isn't that the point, though? You sell the sizzle... but you can't deliver without the steak.

Actually, this is now possible, as Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy steakless applications. I think i heard that.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#120

Post by manquer »

aspencer8111 wrote: post #34
beachy wrote: post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

It is not that simple.

While premature optimization is definitely a problem, In my experience not handling it correctly before the app is in prod usually results in having to fix logical bugs , refactor for performance and add new features users are clamouring for at the same time.

We don't get lot of chances with users to say you will eventually fix these issues for them, you will simply loose them .

As all things there has to be a balance between both ends

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