OMG its JavaScript, I can't even.
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
381–390 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.
Junior and midlevel devs aren't decision makers for government benefit websites. The culture of not giving a shit is real, but the responsibility goes far beyond these roles.
Preach! Amen! Hallelujah!
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Junior and midlevel devs aren't decision makers for government benefit websites. The culture of not giving a shit is real, but the responsibility goes far beyond these roles.
I am always baffled by people who blame developers. Like some mid dev or junior would calling shots what stack should be used for project.
You'd be surprised, then. Some managers don't know squat. I rolled onto a project once and found that an entire application was being delivered as a 300MB ActiveX control, to run in a browser because that was cool and "cutting-edge" at the time.
Looking at the code, I found it was using UI elements for data storage and other such nonsense. A colleague and I had to tell the manager that the entire thing had to be rewritten. I'm not sure he actually went pale, but that's how I remember it.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#384Excellent article but I am always torn when I read inspirational articles like this - it makes perfect sense to me and I love the idea of simple, non-nonsense sites that work well, load quickly and don't rely on the latest browsers to function. Then I start to wonder if that's just because I'm not smart enough to understand React or whatever the fancy technology of the day is. Feels like I have a hard understanding t…
you might enjoy this post on complexity and why it is bad: https://tengstrand.github.io/blog/2019-09-14-the-origin-of-c...
keeping things simple is not a bad thing, and often requires you to be smart enough not to overcomplicate them.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#385"customers could either use an old ASP form on the website"
Did I miss it, or did the article neglect to explain why this was a problem?
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#386The landing page for our latest tool is a static website (exported from nextjs). It has no marketing on it. It just has simple instructions to copy a prompt into ChatGPT / Claude.
That's it. I will report back if it works.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Junior and midlevel devs aren't decision makers for government benefit websites. The culture of not giving a shit is real, but the responsibility goes far beyond these roles.
I am always baffled by people who blame developers. Like some mid dev or junior would calling shots what stack should be used for project.
When you give the project to a bunch of junior devs the stack is necessarily decided by one or more of them since there's nobody else to decide it...
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.
New cheap android phones are just as slow as old cheap android phones. The bottom of the market has been stuck in performance limbo for years, and modern web dev frameworks are ill designed to meet them where they are at.
My cheap phone has 6 cores and 8GB I think. My first cheap phone had 1 core and 256MB. Both ran Android. I think you're mistaken.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#389[flagged]
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#390As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part: > There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.” Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form,…
It is harder to do more with less. There is a reason React and other is used so much. Makes it easier to make interactive websites. It’s like asking why backend engineers think it’s harder to code an api using C instead of using Django.