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Why is modern web development so complicated?

vrk.dev

221–230 of 731 posts

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#221

It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.

This comment makes me realize, I need to get back to my RoR roots and build a server side rendered site again to see what I've forgotten with building React sites for a while.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#222

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

I have a similar story. I got hired on to replace some PHP web apps, each one written using a different framework. Each one out of date, unpatched, unknown dependencies, no easy way to bring up to date-- tied to specific old PHP versions. A big mess. The IT director was pretty savvy and said he wanted a clean rewrite without frameworks, something I was all too happy to do.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#223

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

Sad that you're voted down. I'm a developer and I agree with the sentiment. Web browsers are being used as a run time.

> Web browsers are being used as a run time.

Yes, because that's valuable to the business. My department makes money doing what we do, I'm making my life easier using an SPA framework.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#224
post #145

It's becoming so complicated that I'm struggling to come up with ideas for how to get my 13 year old nephew interested in web development. When he was born I used to dream of having him look at a button on a web page and him asking me "what actually happens when I click that button" I shudder to think where I would even begin to answer that today.

The fundamentals haven't changed. You can teach basic html in an afternoon, eventually making a static site or something in a few weeks. Thats how every web dev today learned to web dev.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#225
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

I'm sure it's possible. Someone may come along who is all into DrupalPress and Agilereactboxqueryhack and think it's primitive. But they won't be able to say it's not maintainable, upgradable, or scalable. And it's documented out the wazoo, all the way down to the CSS both in code and in the accompanying PDFs. The last developer gave zero thought to who would come next. I've given great thought, and included the occa…

if you don't use sass then it's not maintainable or scalable.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#226

These "i hate debugging wandering pixels" and "i don't want to figure out why my css doesn't work" opinions sounds like they come from people who aren't really front end developers; like they come from the kind of dev who would sit and complain about the frontend devs on their company, thinking that they're a lower class of people. I've been working on the server- and client-side of the web for about 10 years now, an…

> they come from people who aren't really front end developers

I think web frontend development transitioned from "acceptably complicated" to "way too complicated" some time around that time the first person wrote "Front End Developer" on their business card.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#227
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.

The market may be large, but that seems like saying the market for cooks is large. The work required for doing 4 sites is double the work required for doing 2. Unless theres some scaling secret I dont know about.

The idea isn't to capture the entire billion dollar market, but to navigate a market that is large enough to safely feed you and many more for the next decade+, precisely because it isn't scalable (so there won't be any FAANG-or-whatever coming along, eating your lunch)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working as a full stack web developer for the last 15 years during this transformation and this couldn't be further from the truth. No full stack developer feels they aren't a real developer. But I think more than anything the full stack's have been the drive of a lot of this complications because all these complications make everything way easier for us. Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years…

I would greatly appreciate, given your 15 years as a full stack developer, that you explain what you are using today, and (hopefully) why. I'm also curious if you might have some vision for the future?

It really depends on the problem you are solving.

Like internal tools, consumer facing tools, content site, social site, etc. Is it an MVP? Rebuilding an old system? Is this a build it, ship it and move on? Or build, enhance and maintain for foreseeable future? What's required lifetime of it? What's the desired lifetime?

As well as resources. You want to use different setups if you are a single person compared to a team of 15.

Generally speaking the smaller the team the simpler the architecture needs to be. And the larger, the more isolation you want between pieces.

Personally I currently like Rails and React best. Both are fairly mature frameworks and work well together. Not to say there aren't better alternatives just those are the two that have worked best for me. There's so many good options that no one knows them all well enough to make a fair comparison.

I think Rust is very promising as a much faster alternative to Ruby and expect to switch over to it sometime in the next decade. But I don't feel the web frameworks for it are mature enough yet that I can justify a switch to it to my employer.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

Just don't build software and then we won't have shit software

Having bad software or a bad website is very often not an existential threat to companies, but having no software or no website is very often an existential threat.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#230
post #60

It isn’t. With modern frameworks (e.g. React + Typescript + some CSS framework), it is surprisingly straightforward to build the front ends for highly complex applications.

What does your react setup look like? Do you use webpack? Just babel? What about grunt/gulp? How often do these things change? If you left your project for 12 months, would it still work?

Yes, no, no, very rarely, absolutely.

It's really not that complicated.

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