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Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#141

Post by tachion »

brianwawok wrote: post #127
tachion wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, sometimes you cant have it all, but in my experience (and hey, I am aware that I'm biased here!) I've seen ops engineers being better at programming than developers at doing ops. Another reason why I'd prefer to have 2 devels and 1 ops person is that that single ops person can bring to the table entirely different experience and point of view and that's a pure added value here. If you think that infra teams is…

If you make a few competing 3-man startups. One team has 2 devs and an op guy One team has 3 devs, one of which knows enough ops to ship code One team has 1 dev, 1 MBA, and 1 QA One team has 1 MBA, 1 QA, 1 Marketing guy I pick the 3 dev team, and hope each of them can fill in some of the other roles on the side (ops, marketing, qa). Not everyone would pick the dev team, but I would.

How about I pick team with 3 ops persons I know, and all of them are better programmers than some of the professional developers I had to work with? And they also can do marketing and sales! ;) How come this approach can sound insane, but the 'full devs on' can't? I pick 2 devs 1 ops every single time, because, you know, OPS PEOPLE CAN CODE TOO as well 'good enough' as devs can do ops good enough and with 2 devs in team we've already developer skills covered. All I'm asking for is some sane approach instead of 'devs can do everything well enough'.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#142

Post by lj3 »

jalfresi wrote: post #132
lj3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about a browser plugin that runs arbitrary .exe code via a plugin? It would have to be sandboxed, of course, but it would give you all of the benefits of a browser distribution model without having to deal with the DOM.

Why not just make QML a media type and a spec that browsers can to implement? Then we can do away with all this HMTL-Page-Is-An-App nonsense

Why limit ourselves to a single UI format? Forget the part I said about a plugin. What if browsers were able to load and execute LLVM bitcode natively in a sandbox? You could get native performance in the browser using any language you'd like.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#143

Post by elsurudo »

MattRogish wrote: post #116
whack wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale" Can you clarify more on this.

My quote is "everyone leaves Heroku eventually". Either you hit something that Heroku won't let you do (because of their tightly bound model) or you are burning tens of thousands a month on what would cost 20% on AWS/GKE, and you do it for cost savings (people are nontrivially expensive, of course)/ownership. Everyone leaves Heroku eventually. :D

Most sites never hit a scale big enough that they would need to leave

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#144

Post by brianwawok »

tachion wrote: post #141
brianwawok wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a few competing 3-man startups. One team has 2 devs and an op guy One team has 3 devs, one of which knows enough ops to ship code One team has 1 dev, 1 MBA, and 1 QA One team has 1 MBA, 1 QA, 1 Marketing guy I pick the 3 dev team, and hope each of them can fill in some of the other roles on the side (ops, marketing, qa). Not everyone would pick the dev team, but I would.

How about I pick team with 3 ops persons I know, and all of them are better programmers than some of the professional developers I had to work with? And they also can do marketing and sales! ;) How come this approach can sound insane, but the 'full devs on' can't? I pick 2 devs 1 ops every single time, because, you know, OPS PEOPLE CAN CODE TOO as well 'good enough' as devs can do ops good enough and with 2 devs in t…

Not really sure I understand what you are saying.

Ops is not hard. A good dev can do it. I am a developer, not an ops person. I have written 100s of ansible scripts. I have dealt with deployments of single servers up to 100 servers across all kinds of hosts.

Your argument is "OPS PERSON CAN CODE TOO"

My argument is "DEV PERSON CAN OPS TOO"

Really labels are stupid.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#145

Post by weddpros »

Many/most backends are stateless... In a way, they push the complexity of distributed systems to the db. They don't deal with sharding, load balancing, request routing... so they leave some performance on the table.

They are still built as if it's normal to split the backend in two: app server + db.

Maybe backends will learn from databases, and become sharded, redondant, and stateful. The border between app server and db could become fuzzy...

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#146

Post by T-A »

awolden wrote: post #138
T-A wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because its much easier to create a top-notch UX using HTML stack No, because it's what the hordes of inexpensive web developers know how to use.

> inexpensive web developers Ask most companies how much they are spending on their web-dev teams and they might disagree with you on that one

Web Developer Salary Range: http://www.itcareerfinder.com/brain-food/it-salaries/web-dev...

Software Engineer Salary Range: http://www.itcareerfinder.com/brain-food/it-salaries/compute...

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#147

Post by pauljaworski »

nol13 wrote: post #66
pauljaworski wrote: post #7

When I started building out the back-end of my latest project, I realized its only purpose was to persist data to a NoSQL database. I had a small epiphany and decided I didn't need to build a server at all - I could just use something like Firebase to accomplish that task. Now that I'm getting deeper into the project, I need to add in features like PDF generation. No problem! I'll use microservices for that. Well, th…

That's what jsPDF is for.

I've looked at that, but it doesn't fit my use case.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#148

Post by pauljaworski »

fermuch wrote: post #72
pauljaworski wrote: post #7

When I started building out the back-end of my latest project, I realized its only purpose was to persist data to a NoSQL database. I had a small epiphany and decided I didn't need to build a server at all - I could just use something like Firebase to accomplish that task. Now that I'm getting deeper into the project, I need to add in features like PDF generation. No problem! I'll use microservices for that. Well, th…

An easier approach IMO would be to create an amazon lambda script to process the pdf and make it run when you upload a file to a bucket in amazon s3. It's easy to do and you don't need to mess with anything more than two simple API.

I initially planned on using Lambda for things like this, but in this scenario, it does not seem appropriate. I'm a total noob to Lambda, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I need a system with Qt installed to use my PDF library, and it doesn't seem like I can accomplish that with Lambda.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#149

Post by mabbo »

collyw wrote: post #71
mabbo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the problems that both Lambda and Containers/PaaS solve for you: ignoring infrastructure. It's there, sure, but I don't care much about it. Now take that idea to the absolute extreme. I write code, I push it into the cloudy-cloud machine, and it's serving clients immediately.

As someone that knows how to set up a server, I found Heroku a lot more difficult to get a Django app running than on a "normal" server. And a lot more of a PITA to debug.

Then Heroku aren't the solution either. But they're a step towards it. It's all attempts to get it right, wild swings in the darkness. Someone's going to smack it hard in the head and we're all going to ask why we didn't think of that before.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#150

Post by sten »

brianwawok wrote: post #144
tachion wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about I pick team with 3 ops persons I know, and all of them are better programmers than some of the professional developers I had to work with? And they also can do marketing and sales! ;) How come this approach can sound insane, but the 'full devs on' can't? I pick 2 devs 1 ops every single time, because, you know, OPS PEOPLE CAN CODE TOO as well 'good enough' as devs can do ops good enough and with 2 devs in t…

Not really sure I understand what you are saying. Ops is not hard. A good dev can do it. I am a developer, not an ops person. I have written 100s of ansible scripts. I have dealt with deployments of single servers up to 100 servers across all kinds of hosts. Your argument is "OPS PERSON CAN CODE TOO" My argument is "DEV PERSON CAN OPS TOO" Really labels are stupid.

I took it as a lampoon on the "Full stack dev in x" bullshit that gets tossed around. It does sound insane to expect the devs to also be marketing gurus and finance experts and legal wizards... but no one bats a eye at the idea of "PhD. ML who also knows front end JS".
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