Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#201

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

Jaygles wrote: post #94

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

Because sometimes you want to learn the fancy tools but only need to make something simple. When the time comes to make the complex web app, you are now more prepared.

This attitude doesn’t have a ceiling. The same person compelled by that impulse also manages to use an unnecessary data structure that introduces complexity. I’ve seen todo-app-like functionality done with serious data structures that made the code needlessly complex.

Why am I here bitching all the time? Because I don’t have it in me to fight someone at work. The underlying tension can be reduced to me saying ‘you know this is crazy right?’, followed with ‘you don’t get it because you are not a real programmer’, and alas, those are both fighting words from both sides.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#202

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #199

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me. Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web ba…

I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding.

If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones.

Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too.

They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#203

Post by watermelon59 » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:46 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #196

papertokyo wrote: post #5

Frank is right, of course. Staying up to date with the tooling, best practices, and user expectations of the web requires an unreasonable amount of attention if making websites is only a small part of your service offering. One reason I prefer frontend libraries like Vue and Svelte is they feel closer to the grain of the web (HTMLesque templates with JS and CSS sprinkled in), and provide a reasonable level of abstrac…

Let’s not just pick on frontend. Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS? Devops is nearing similar levels of insanity, and often for applications that won’t even have 50 users (seriously, all these companies that advertise for AWS experience for a tool that is going to be fucking internal with less than 50 users). It all builds up in me to be honest. You get the frontend complicated, then the deploy/in…

> Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS?

I've given up every time I've tried it on personal projects. It's just a complete poorly document mess indeed.

At work we host our stuff on AWS but we have an ops team that deals with all the garbage. All I care about are APIs, endpoints and that one thing can talk to another.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#204

Post by cutler » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

Meanwhile the web development jobs market is booming like never before. WordPress and Squarespace aren't the answer to everything.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#205

Post by thyrsus » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #103

em-bee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there's hundreds of apps that will never be updated or changed to conform to standards. i suspect many of those are no longer actively maintained. at best they receive security patches from distributions. Tell that to snap. It insists its folder must sit nicely in my home folder and nowhere else. my (low) opinion of snap aside, the bad here is that the location is not configurable. as a library of application…

I don't want to turn this into a snap bad mouthing thread, but yeah. You can't even symlink it or it causes problems. It really bugs me because I don't tend to allocate too much space to my home partition and keep most of my stuff on data partitions. So if I get a bunch of snap apps, it starts eating up all the space in home.

Can you wrap its invocation in a script that sets a snap specific version of the $HOME environment variable? If it's perverse, it ignores $HOME in favor of reading the passwd entry itself, in which case I'm happy to have never encountered it.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#206

Post by cutler » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #74

nanna wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Typically' meaning...? Jekyll? Gatsby?

I have a couple of older static sites (one using Jekyll/Octopress, one using Middleman), and if I ever do a bundle update something is guaranteed to break. Not sure if that's the "bloat" the parent comment is talking about though.

I've been using Perl Template::Toolkit since around 2001 and it's even better since version 3 was released. Worth a try. You don't even need to know Perl to make use of it.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#207

Post by nirui » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:18 AM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #11

papertokyo wrote: post #5

Frank is right, of course. Staying up to date with the tooling, best practices, and user expectations of the web requires an unreasonable amount of attention if making websites is only a small part of your service offering. One reason I prefer frontend libraries like Vue and Svelte is they feel closer to the grain of the web (HTMLesque templates with JS and CSS sprinkled in), and provide a reasonable level of abstrac…

And this is exactly why any of my hobby projects that involve JS are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible. I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.

> ... are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible ...

I was having the same opinion and practice. However, I'm kind regret it as well.

Even if you done everything with plain JS, eventually, one day some idea will float into your head such as "Hey... I want to automatically compress the script file/snip", "Hey I wonder if I can polyfill all my script", "Automatically bundle assets?", "Compress assets images?" etc.

Then, you start to learn Webpack/Gulp/Grunt (if the last two are still alive), and commit your entire soul to it few minutes later.

I think the reason for the messy front-end tech is, the Web itself is messy. You have to consider a lots of things, networking, file management, cache management, cookie, user-side storage, security etc. Some eyes saw the problem and then built a framework to address it, then others discovered some other issues in the framework ... the circle of life.

I guess we'll eventually settle down on something when people finally figure out what they want from the Web technology, or when the Web is "dead" (no dramatic changes anymore, like what happened to Desktop Applications today).

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#208

Post by cutler » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

Folks, just say NO! NO! to React, Vue, Angular or whatever is your SPA poison. NO! to Webbpack or whatever JS bundler. NO! to AWS, GCP and Azure. NO! to Docker. ABSOLUTELY NO! to Kubernetes. Does anyone using React or Angular remember what their use cases were when they were invented? Face ****ing Book and GMail, not your crappy little website which ran fine for years with only a splash of jQuery. Kubernetes was designed for massive fleets of servers, not your tiny little AWS instance. Just say NO! Even if your page occasionally has to do a full refresh - SO ****ing WHAT!? Are you really going to give-up all your family time for the marginal benefit of having your almost static website update pages without a refresh? If you really must there's now a version of Hotwire for pretty much every major web framework out there so you can still render server-side.

Say YES! to raw ES6, Hotwire and judicious use of jQuery. With SPA's the motto is YAGNI unless you're Shopify.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#209

Post by alanbernstein » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:35 AM UTC

nirui wrote: post #207

MereInterest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is exactly why any of my hobby projects that involve JS are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible. I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.

> ... are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible ... I was having the same opinion and practice. However, I'm kind regret it as well. Even if you done everything with plain JS, eventually, one day some idea will float into your head such as "Hey... I want to automatically compress the script file/snip", "Hey I wonder if I can polyfill all my script", "Automatically bundle assets?", "Compress assets ima…

I have lots of tiny hobby projects. I never want to do any of those things you mentioned. Just a simple page, with the minimum amount of javascript to make it work.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#210

Post by cutler » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:35 AM UTC

watermelon59 wrote: post #203

runawaybottle wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not just pick on frontend. Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS? Devops is nearing similar levels of insanity, and often for applications that won’t even have 50 users (seriously, all these companies that advertise for AWS experience for a tool that is going to be fucking internal with less than 50 users). It all builds up in me to be honest. You get the frontend complicated, then the deploy/in…

> Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS? I've given up every time I've tried it on personal projects. It's just a complete poorly document mess indeed. At work we host our stuff on AWS but we have an ops team that deals with all the garbage. All I care about are APIs, endpoints and that one thing can talk to another.

Yeah, so much for the fantasy of cloud platforms eliminating the need for ops staff. The guy who used to setup and manage your Linux VPSs just switched jobs to manage your AWS infra and charges extra for it.