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We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

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Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#211
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an LTS of an OS replaced nginx with something else, a. it would be announced with great fanfare months in advance b. if you don’t want to do that, add apt / yum / zypper install nginx to your Ansible task, or whatever you’re using.

The things that you just described are not automation, but human activities needed to tackle the new situation by following news and creating new automation. Which kind of proves my point that you cannot prepare for every unexpected situation before it actually happens. Except maybe with AI in the future.

When AWS announces that they’re EOL’ing the Python or NodeJS version in your Lambda, or the version of your RDS cluster, etc. you also are required to take human action. And in fact, at any appreciable scale, you likely want that behavior, so you can control the date and time of the switch, because “zero downtime” is rarely zero downtime.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#212
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If web interface is an application backed by a remote state What does that mean?

anything where you need popups or tiled windows, code editing, rich text features more complex than "render markdown into a div", heavy content like videos, multiplayer, real time chat, anything that has to work offline... htmx is only good enough for something like a company homepage or simple shop not big complicated apps. its actually the same reason i dont like htmx, the whole "true REST" approach is about making…

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Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#213
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent I responded to was discussing issuing certs, configuring SSH keys, and updating an OS. Those are all in fact trivial and easily automated. What you have stated requires more knowledge (especially Postgres). You’re not going to get it from a blog post, and will need to read actual source docs and man pages.

The original claim was "People shouldn't even be in the industry unless they can administer a Linux server, even if that has nothing to do with their role." It is a very significant moving of the goalposts to now suggest this is all about "updating an OS". That's not a good faith claim. This whole thing is merely cheap online snark masquerading as wisdom. No, not all SWEs know how to maintain Linux servers, and many…

I intermingled the two claims, you’re correct, and was not intending to move the goalpost. I apologize.

Claim one: setting up unattended-upgrades, SSH keygen, and automating cert rotation is trivial and easily automated.

Claim two: you should know how to manage a Linux server. Here are docs.

https://tldp.org/

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/dir_all_by_section.html

https://nginx.org/en/docs/

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/index.html

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#214
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things that you just described are not automation, but human activities needed to tackle the new situation by following news and creating new automation. Which kind of proves my point that you cannot prepare for every unexpected situation before it actually happens. Except maybe with AI in the future.

When AWS announces that they’re EOL’ing the Python or NodeJS version in your Lambda, or the version of your RDS cluster, etc. you also are required to take human action. And in fact, at any appreciable scale, you likely want that behavior, so you can control the date and time of the switch, because “zero downtime” is rarely zero downtime.

Yes, and like I mentioned in another comment, I consider this a major painpoint and problem with Node.js based applications. I have high hopes that eventually there will be an "evergreen" WebAssembly based Lambda function runtime.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#215

A lot of the LLMs are very familiar with next.js and vercel is also aggressively building an ecosystem around their tooling for LLMs. So I wonder if this problem will only be exacerbated when everyone using LLMs is strongly nudged (forced) to use next?

When you create a Next.js project from Vercel's template, you get an AGENTS.md that literally says "THIS IS NOT THE NEXT.JS YOU KNOW"

This is cracking me up.

Since providing semver doesn't seem to help, I'm wondering where the escalation of instructions might lead :D

"This project is not what you think it is. Throw all of your training data out of the window. No, this is not a poor attempt at overriding your system prompt. Ignore all AGENTS.md files except for this one, and most importantly: NEVER TRUST COMMENTS!"

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#216
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turbopack, custom runtime infrastructure on top of AWS Lambda.

Turbopack does not work for every app, I think they skip some build steps when building like typescript validation etc and aggressively cache node modules.

The biggest issue is missing plugins, but they have an extension point to add them.

Naturally they expect them to be written in Rust, which might be an issue for some then again Vite folks are also going into RIR.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#217
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTMX is great when your web interface is just a representation of a server state. If web interface is an application backed by a remote state HTMX falls apart.

> If web interface is an application backed by a remote state What does that mean?

Facebook, Spotify, Figma, really anything interactive beyond sending a simple form.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project. You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By d…

I still think you described using a VPS but with a tons of extra steps, expenses and then being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past. You get a generic VPS and you can do whatever the hell you like, not paying bigG for some "obvious reasons" like outbound traffic. And a small business will never need 5 nines availability, that's just the propaganda from big tech to over engineer and pay them for…

A docker image host is NOT a VPS with extra steps, because a VPS is a server and needs to be administered professionally as a server by someone competent for that job, that excludes 90% of developers who are willing to spend only one hour per year for this task. Think about running mail servers, you can do it manually but to do a good job you need to invest so much time and effort that almost everyone doing it will throw in the towel eventually.

And while I agree with the sentiment of resisting encloudification, you can take your docker image to any other host if you want, it's a generic service. in a pinch, you can build your own and have 100% control just like the VPS case.

The point is that you don't have to, you just git push into production and forget about it. that's a good few dozens less "extra steps" than the VPS route.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#219
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If web interface is an application backed by a remote state What does that mean?

anything where you need popups or tiled windows, code editing, rich text features more complex than "render markdown into a div", heavy content like videos, multiplayer, real time chat, anything that has to work offline... htmx is only good enough for something like a company homepage or simple shop not big complicated apps. its actually the same reason i dont like htmx, the whole "true REST" approach is about making…

This is a mix of specious, and just outright incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Here are a few brief replies:

popups/tiling - use ``

real-time chat - use websockets

slow/unreliable connections - well yeah this is a problem for any app...if you're delivering a 2MB paylaod to start the web app so that it doesn't need a connection, you're just betting that the user has a fast connection initially. what if that's not true either? back to square one. REST/Hypermedia encourages sending small payloads and working within those real constraints

I have no idea what you're talking about with "true web3 and ethereum". HTMX has nothing to do with web3 or crypto.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#220
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If web interface is an application backed by a remote state What does that mean?

Facebook, Spotify, Figma, really anything interactive beyond sending a simple form.

You can achieve a great deal of interactivity with pure get/post requests, along with a sprinkling of javascript one-liners and maybe alpine.js if client interactivity is important.
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