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

There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 337 posts

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#21

Post by jspash »

andybak wrote: post #10
tannhaeuser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, TFA praises Tailwind CSS as "solving CSS", and as great as it may be, I guess that statement lacks a bit of nuance.

I hear so many people recommend Tailwind but every time I look at examples it reminds me of an entry for the 17th Annual Esoteric Programming Language Competition. Maybe you get used to it but hell it looks hard to parse visually.

Tailwind is definitely a Marmite framework (either you love it or you hate it). Yes it can be difficult to read. And it can be difficult to debug and fix something where you make a small change and it cascades 'upwards' somehow. But... the problems I have with Tailwind are no different to the ones I had with CSS and all the various magic methodologies that were supposed to "fix" css - things like BEM & SMACCS). But the big difference is that I can solve those problems in a fraction of the time with Tailwind. As a last resort you can just strip out all the classes of the elements in question and start over. If I had to do that with normal CSS, it would almost definitely break something somewhere else. With Tailwind, you are working in a highly localised area and can see everything you need on one screen. That, to me, is the power of Tailwind.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#22

Post by 0x0nyandesu »

auggierose wrote: post #16
0x0nyandesu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way as the author but I work with php. Recently it's all been TDD, statically typed, and JavaScript gets web packed into one or two files so instead of juggling 15 script tags I only have one or two and a style tag for css. With CI this all happens in the background on every commit. What you pay for when you hire a dev like me with 17 years of experience in the field is the ability to know which libra…

Is that not something you can learn by picking up any number of good books in the area in much less time? I am just getting into TypeScript programming, and I am really having fun. I learnt about the details of how Javascript works, and it is quite cool to have a static layer over a dynamic one. For learning JavaScript, I like "The Good Parts" and the "You don't know JS" series. It took me a while to learn how to cre…

Not really. You can't replicate experience. Everything you just wrote about with data types, invariants, and decorators is just flavor which you only have control over in your own personal code however as soon as you interact with web browser APIs, nodejs, and 3rd party libraries all that goes out the window and you end up conforming to other people's patterns.

In my honest opinion Typescript is a fad. You're still just coding JavaScript with an alternative syntax. Since you're borrowing dependencies from JS you need to know both and context switching between the two slows you down. From a CS perspective I get why TS syntax is better but from a functional perspective it's harder to find engineers that actually want to work with it because every TS project I've ever seen is really a mix of TS and JS.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#23

Post by stopcraeting »

geokon wrote: post #8

From reading this I get the sense the problems are lower level and there is no impetus to fix them. I'm embarrassed to say, having programmed for over a decade, and running Linux for half of that, I still have no idea how to setup my computer to serve a webpage (or even a file) I probably need to `apt-get install apache` and then deal with some magic config files and incantations and hope I don't mess something up an…

> Hosting webpages from home is still complicated and no progress has been made.

Now this would be a real improvement, not some new framework of the week.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#24

Post by nextlevelwizard »

> Static was a fun diversion, but we're back to what works.

I won't be moving away from static website. It is perfect solution for a blog/CV type thing.

>you might think that minutes-long build processes are normal

If compiling your static site takes minutes there is something fundamentally wrong with your site in my opinion.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#25

Post by proxyon »

rambambram wrote: post #15

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

here here. keep fighting the good fight

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#26

Post by Winsaucerer »

stopcraeting wrote: post #18

I hate every new technology listed in this article. I recently removed all of my SQL-in-programming-language code (orm, strings of SQL) etc, and just wrote actual SQL in files with .sql at the end and load them at run-time. I am now, when my finger heels, going to do the same for the React. I hate React. I have been using it for years and I have never enjoyed it. I feel like everything made after the boomer technolog…

> just wrote actual SQL in files with .sql at the end and load them at run-time

I like this idea, but I'm interested to learn how you are handling dynamic queries -- e.g., when you want to change the order-by field? You can use CASE in some situations, but it has limitations. Another option is to construct the dynamic query in SQL rather than in your outside-the-db application code. Just curious how you approached and solved this?

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#27

Post by proxyon »

auggierose wrote: post #16
0x0nyandesu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way as the author but I work with php. Recently it's all been TDD, statically typed, and JavaScript gets web packed into one or two files so instead of juggling 15 script tags I only have one or two and a style tag for css. With CI this all happens in the background on every commit. What you pay for when you hire a dev like me with 17 years of experience in the field is the ability to know which libra…

Is that not something you can learn by picking up any number of good books in the area in much less time? I am just getting into TypeScript programming, and I am really having fun. I learnt about the details of how Javascript works, and it is quite cool to have a static layer over a dynamic one. For learning JavaScript, I like "The Good Parts" and the "You don't know JS" series. It took me a while to learn how to cre…

> Is that not something you can learn by picking up any number of good books in the area in much less time?

I'm shocked that you believe this. Work at a moderate or higher sized tech company. The juniors, mid levels and seniors all make the same mistakes and slowly grow out of making them. If it were the case that everyone could stop making the same mistakes and choosing the wrong abstractions simply by reading a book then professional programmers would be good on day one and make none of those mistakes and college students who've read dozens of books would come in at the top of the rankings.

> I am just getting into TypeScript programming, and I am really having fun. I learnt about the details of how Javascript works, and it is quite cool to have a static layer over a dynamic one. For learning JavaScript, I like "The Good Parts" and the "You don't know JS" series. It took me a while to learn how to create a datatype that can defend its invariants not only statically, but also at runtime, but that seems quite feasible as well, especially with decorators. It is interesting though that nobody seems to be particularly interested in doing that, there is not much direct information about this available.

This is learning to code, it's not learning to engineer. Assuming you finish your book(s) you'll start on the path of making lots and lots of mistakes until you grow into someone with more experience who stops making them.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#28

Post by christophilus »

omgitsabird wrote: post #13

> CSS is effectively solved. Tailwind CSS is the best thing to ever happen to CSS. I cannot imagine ever writing CSS in a separate file and having to think of names for elements. It's also an excellent resource for beginners. I work with developers still have difficulty with concepts like specificity and cascading even though they have been working with CSS for many years. I don't think statements like this are true…

Tailwind kind of makes specificity and the cascade a non issue, though. Sounds like it might be just the thing for these developers.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#29

Post by CraigJPerry »

alin23 wrote: post #19
geokon wrote: post #8

From reading this I get the sense the problems are lower level and there is no impetus to fix them. I'm embarrassed to say, having programmed for over a decade, and running Linux for half of that, I still have no idea how to setup my computer to serve a webpage (or even a file) I probably need to `apt-get install apache` and then deal with some magic config files and incantations and hope I don't mess something up an…

If opening the 80/443 port is such a nuissance in your setup, I would not bother with hosting from home and I'd just drop the website folder in Netlify Drop ( https://app.netlify.com/drop ) That's what I did for the first few iterations of https://lunar.fyi and it really helped with giving people the right information fast while I could keep spending time on the real work (developing the Lunar app) But if hosting fro…

Hey - awesome work on that lunar page, i know it's a landing page and the goal is conversion but it was genuinely enjoyable to read, fun even. Fantastic.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#30

Post by stopcraeting »

rambambram wrote: post #15

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

It is against the TOS of the largest ISP in my country to even host a server of any sort. Colocation isn't that fun.
Post reply on HN