Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#171

Post by elias94 »

What I found frustrating is how fast a front-end project is getting old.

Taking a NPM+Framework project of 9 months old I often have a low change of install-run at the first time. Always there's an update, an incompatibility, or something that brakes the build process and I need a couple of hours to fix it again.

Is not possible to work like this in the long run. Front-end projects are investments of time and money and I want them to be durable and maintainable for a long period.

P.S. I started digging into clojurescript/webassembly for this reason

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#172

Post by gunshowmo »

I definitely understand the frustration towards the growing ecosystem of web app technologies, but I think people really disregard the necessity of the complexity.

There are certain things that basic HTML/CSS simply cannot do, or if it can, does so in a very hacky way. For basic websites, you can absolutely get away with more basic templating, but as soon as you enter the territory of clean looking UI components that are both visibly appealing and functional, you are basically required to implement the complexity somewhere the choice of framework then is just determining how you want to structure that complexity. When you try to make a performant web application with a lot of interconnected, moving parts, the reason for a lot of the "bloat" becomes very apparent.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#173

Post by d3ntb3ev1l »

gunshowmo wrote: post #172

I definitely understand the frustration towards the growing ecosystem of web app technologies, but I think people really disregard the necessity of the complexity. There are certain things that basic HTML/CSS simply cannot do, or if it can, does so in a very hacky way. For basic websites, you can absolutely get away with more basic templating, but as soon as you enter the territory of clean looking UI components that…

At what level does “clean looking ui” overtake unnecessary complexity

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#174

Post by gunshowmo »

d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #173
gunshowmo wrote: post #172

I definitely understand the frustration towards the growing ecosystem of web app technologies, but I think people really disregard the necessity of the complexity. There are certain things that basic HTML/CSS simply cannot do, or if it can, does so in a very hacky way. For basic websites, you can absolutely get away with more basic templating, but as soon as you enter the territory of clean looking UI components that…

At what level does “clean looking ui” overtake unnecessary complexity

Sometimes clean looking UI requires complexity.

If I need to let a user sort a list of items, is it more UI/UX friendly to make them press a button multiple times until an item is in the right place, or is it better to let them click and drag the item to the right part of the list?

The latter requires a lot more work but makes the experience a lot smoother.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#175

Post by danShumway »

elias94 wrote: post #171

What I found frustrating is how fast a front-end project is getting old. Taking a NPM+Framework project of 9 months old I often have a low change of install-run at the first time. Always there's an update, an incompatibility, or something that brakes the build process and I need a couple of hours to fix it again. Is not possible to work like this in the long run. Front-end projects are investments of time and money a…

There's a dirty secret that's fallen out of favor in the Node community, but that helps dramatically with this problem: it is usually a good idea to vendor dependencies for front-end projects (basically any project you're making that isn't being published to NPM).

The trick with this is you have to avoid dependencies that compile C code or native binaries as part of their installation process, since those binaries might not be portable. I try when possible to avoid anything that's using node-gyp.

But if you are vendoring dependencies and they're compatible with the system you're compiling on, then you will never need to worry about libraries breaking or changing underneath your nose.

You will still need to worry about security vulnerabilities, but that's just the case with all software. At the very least, 10 years from now your project will still compile.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#176

Post by waynesonfire »

gunshowmo wrote: post #174
d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what level does “clean looking ui” overtake unnecessary complexity

Sometimes clean looking UI requires complexity. If I need to let a user sort a list of items, is it more UI/UX friendly to make them press a button multiple times until an item is in the right place, or is it better to let them click and drag the item to the right part of the list? The latter requires a lot more work but makes the experience a lot smoother.

You have one other option, the most difficult of all, to eliminate the use case.

Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#177

Post by meremortals »

volkk wrote: post #46
mauvehaus wrote: post #37

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace. I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own. Granted some of thi…

what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way

looks like OP got into woodworking based on his profile: https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#178

Post by gunshowmo »

waynesonfire wrote: post #176
gunshowmo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes clean looking UI requires complexity. If I need to let a user sort a list of items, is it more UI/UX friendly to make them press a button multiple times until an item is in the right place, or is it better to let them click and drag the item to the right part of the list? The latter requires a lot more work but makes the experience a lot smoother.

You have one other option, the most difficult of all, to eliminate the use case. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminat…

I highly encourage you to look at a picture of the inside of an airplane cockpit.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#179

Post by devchix »

ericbarrett wrote: post #155
devchix wrote: post #17

At some point in my organization's press toward Ansible, I came to the realization that Ansible the product is yet another layer of abstraction that is there for its own sake, and of dubious value. I converted a simple script to patch stuff, something that is trivial to write and run, and the yum module behaves different enough from the command-line yum that I have to learn a different way to get and parse the output…

I'm with you on logs. The recent trend of "machine-readable" logs, encapsulated as JSON structs, adds so much complexity to the process, and makes them unscannable to the human eye. And yet for general use cases you're not getting anything a regex couldn't parse out of the log prefix. In 2010 I could search a terabyte of logs with grep -F in under a minute. With a "modern" setup you can't even see your logs until you…

> encapsulated as JSON structs, adds so much complexity to the process

Or XML, you need to have written a parser (or pay Splunk to do it for you), you have to know how deeply nested your param of interest is. AFAIU Splunk has problems with too-deeply nested JSON, it was written at the time of unstructured logs. I can say this with confidence, for most of my problem cases, a good start to finding the culprit was a good tail -f and grep. I doubt myself and frequently ask if I'm one of those idiots who'd rather have faster horses. I mean, those are brilliant people making money hand over fist with their log analytics and event management tools, they know what they're doing, right? Right?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#180

Post by benp84 »

I wonder how much of the problem here is solo developers and big tech developers exchanging advice in the same places.

As a solo dev I relate to this frustration with over-engineering but I can imagine its benefits for big teams.

Post reply on HN