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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#211

Post by kornholi »

bollu wrote: post #189
riskable wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah: I am very particular about fonts myself but what bugs me most isn't sub-pixel hinting (which is "good enough" with the latest freetype IMHO) it's the size of fonts. Windows is so far off the mark on 99% of computers and it drives me crazy! Repeat after me: 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! The "point" scale of fonts is actually a precise, real-world measurement like inches, mil…

Where can I read more about how 72pt ~ 1 inch? Where does one g to for a "course on typography"?

This was posted recently: https://tonsky.me/blog/font-size/

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#212

Post by LordOfWolves »

runawaybottle wrote: post #202
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’, the…

Will we not need some sort of interface for the ordinary user to perform perhaps unordinary action on said data (the same data that’s in airtable)?

The command line can be daunting until you play with it a bit and I know many web devs try to avoid it as much as possible while working.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#213

Post by qudat »

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…

Finally a voice of reason. The front end isnt the only thing that has become complicated. How many services are running on k8s? Now how many of them actually need it?

The list goes on. The front end isnt that complicated relative to back end, there is just one ecosystem vs 10 for the back end.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#214

Post by qudat »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

I see it as the complete opposite. Because of the unique challenges that face front end development it has attracted some extremely talented people.

I wrote my thoughts about this in a recent article: https://erock.io/2021/03/27/my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-...

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#215

Post by WiseWeasel »

danShumway wrote: post #175
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 mi…

By “vendoring” dependencies, I’m guessing you are talking about pulling them out of node_modules (into a js/vendor dir), and checking them into your repo, repeating the process every time you want to update. I will make an offering to Cthulhu if it’ll ensure we won't be using webpack and node 10 years from now in order to build those old snapshots without considerable effort.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#216

Post by midrus »

thirdlamp wrote: post #134
midrus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but the problem, the big problem, is that you're looked down if you propose to use simpler tools. It is horribly difficult to not use these advanced tools for simpler problems. At work my team does just f**ng CRUD forms, and for doing this we have the most overcomplicated stack I've seen in my life. Go backend with React, Redux, Rxjs,custom.webpack craziness, and 32 tons of internal weird libraries…

Without knowing your situation, that sounds like job security to me. "If we go the simple route I'm obsolete"

I think it is just the opposite. In my particular situation at work, if we go the simple route (it's just a 2 step CRUD wizard, so that'd be Rails/django/etc) other 5 people might be redundant.

We need a team of 5 people to mantain this project (and a few smaller ones) because of the architecture (SPA + Go microservices) and the tools (React, rxjs, redux, data loaders, graphql, typescript safe actions whatever, an in-house-built crazy i18n system, custom webpack, some 10s of other open source libraries, and some other 10s of internal custom libraries).

It's crazy. Really crazy.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#217

Post by midrus »

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #184
midrus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame the language tbh. I blame the frameworks and tools (or the lack of) for web development. Look, I love node and javascript. But I can't deny it is is total mistake to use it in a business context for web dev when you have django, rails or Laravel. Same for Go and many other trendy tools.... Reinventing the well is not a good business unless you're in the wheels business.

The language is quite weak. It doesn't even have enums. I blame the industry who fell for golang's marketing and started shoving golang into places where it doesn't belong.

This. I've already stated it a lot. Go is great if you're building a CLI application, a DNS server, a database, some core infrastructure service, Kubernetes extensions/plugins, etc.

But people learn it, get hyped, and want to use it for everything.

So now we're spending months doing things that already exist in popular frameworks.

Go is not for web development.You're not Google.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#219

Post by tommilukkarinen »

dleslie wrote: post #64
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…

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.

This is an essential part of software design today in General. If a part of your system takes time to develope, it should be an instinctive signal to look an alternative. When all of your time is spent on creating value for the customer instead of tweaking technology, you are on the right path. If you find yourself tweaking, you need to stop and look for alternative approach. This does not mean hoarding more tools as I have seen many do, because tools have a maintenance cost.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#220

Post by d13 »

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.

This should be industry standard practice.
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