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

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

boringtechnology.club

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 374 posts

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#241

Post by deckard1 »

BigJono wrote: post #184
austincheney wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.

It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the s…

> some constant strings containing css breakpoints as the type 'string | int'

yeah this really is the fundamental problem with TypeScript advocates. They seem to come in two different breeds: A) people that would rather be doing Haskell but are forced to use JavaScript because that's where the jobs are and see nothing at all wrong with type inference and error messages that are 10 lines long and completely indecipherable by actual humans, and B) people that have never used a language that isn't JavaScript and have no clue how to structure type interfaces within an actual system (you end up with partial/omit and optional fields every-fucking-where and no rhyme or reason behind anything).

For some stupid reason this entire industry seems to suddenly believe that a 40+ year old debate of static vs. dynamic typing was settled because Microsoft came out with TypeScript.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#243

Post by 0xCMP »

I forget sometimes in interviews not everyone reads HN religiously. And I also forgot where I'd learned about "innovation tokens". Needless to say it would have helped to point interviewers to this full talk when explaining why we focused so hard on simplifying our technology stack.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#244

Post by spion »

austincheney wrote: post #158
spion wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much experience do you have working with JS?

I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.

Similar situation here. I disagree that frameworks are the problem though. Build tools, especially related to CSS and assets are IMO the biggest issue. TypeScript's support for monorepos could also be better.

Things have improved a lot since 2009 however, IMO. There was barely a concept of modularity at that time, the tools (e.g. AMD / requirejs / r.js) were way worse and managing the state of the DOM was a pain, jQuery or otherwise.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#245

Post by nift »

collyw wrote: post #99
hackerfromthefu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and where maintainability and tco matter

I think maintainability is mostly down to developer skill and the ability to abstract to the right level. A good Python dev will likely leave far more maintainable code than an average Java dev.

Can't one always say that? Wouldn't it be more fair to compare equal level of skill?

I mean, in most cases it doesn't really matter what tech you choose as 1. Most products don't really need "massive scale" 2. It's more important to be proficient in the tech you pick rather than it being the "best tech ever". I mean Facebook still uses PHP no?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#246

Post by ryandrake »

koonsolo wrote: post #239
_qulr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't enough of the very best developers for a company to plan around hiring only those. I've seen no evidence that companies are even trying to hire developers who "avoid complexity". If anything, the interview processes are designed to select for engineers who bathe in complexity. There are so many interviews which consist of "How would you rewrite from scratch this thing that already exists?"

I'm doing technical interviews. There is such a shortage of people that know the basics of programming, that selecting for such l33t skills is out of the question. The hiring process right now is not about selecting the best, it's about selecting those that pass some low bar.

I don't know what your company is, but it may not have a reputation for paying well. I've worked both at well-paying FAANG companies and lots of BasicAverageTech companies, and the candidate flow is night and day different. There is no shortage of people that "know the basics." In fact, there is no shortage of really strong candidates. They are out there, looking around to job hop like everyone else. It's just that they are probably just not applying at your company. Not that you can personally do anything about your company's compensation, but that might explain it.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#247

Post by eloff »

Nextgrid wrote: post #63
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

I don't buy this theory, because I don't think there are many investors that actually care about the tech stack. If they are, I'd say they're bad investors.

You could create a successful company on any tech stack. It's really like trying to invest in a company based on the way they decorate their HQ. Does it matter at all? Maybe only if it's ridiculously extravagant compared to their revenue.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#248

Post by wwww4all »

acemarke wrote: post #216
wwww4all wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried redux toolkit? createSlices? Redux has greatly improved workflow for integrating with React. The main issue with Redux is that it pretends to be generalized state management engine, with all the overhead, while it’s in a shotgun wedding with React. Will React team attempts another state management, aka Flux, when Redux does 95% of features and is slowly being absorbed into React eco system anyway? Gats…

Not sure what you mean by the "pretends" statement. Both the Redux core and Redux Toolkit _are_ completely UI-agnostic, and can be used with _any_ UI layer or even standalone. Yes, most Redux usage is with React, and we do orient our docs around the assumption that you're probably using Redux and React together, but there's many people who are using Redux separately.

The “pretends” comment is light hearted joke (or is it?) about keeping Redux UI library agnostic. When we all know React is the 8000 pound gorilla pulling on Redux.

The default assumption for any production React application is that it will need Redux at some point. It’s much more efficient to start the React project with Redux, than trying to bolt on Redux after React project is underway after a while. Redux Toolkit does make things bit easier.

It’s like how React pretends that JSX is optional, when we all know JSX is requirement in React projects.

Thanks for all the work on Redux and Redux Toolkit.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#249

Post by tluyben2 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #63
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

I often wonder why investors love paying 5 figure aws bills; even worse, why they consider lower bills or not using 'the cloud' a sign of cto incompetence. Even if the company can run on $500 hosting instead. Must be because it is easy to do DD on: AWS, check, TS (JS is now a reason to not pass VC dd I heard from friends) check , React check, microservices, check, etc.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#250

Post by spurgu »

BigJono wrote: post #176
criddell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about the front end? What's the best, most boring choice there? I was on a project for a bit using React and although it felt like an obvious way to write things, I can't help but feel you can't create something that will last for a decade with it.

You absolutely can. React is the gold standard right now. It's already been king for 6 years and it's not going anywhere. The hype for angular died down. The hype for vue has started to die down. This little bit of hype svelte has at the moment will die down. React does have a ton of problems but they all come from the next level of dependencies down. Shit like Gatsby and Nextjs won't pass the test of time. Neither w…

Gatsby at least spends a lot of effort playing cat and mouse with Google's Pagespeed algorithms so you don't have to. That by itself has tons of value.
Post reply on HN