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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#541

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

xp84 wrote: post #437
josephg wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious if - and when - LLMs change this. They’re very good at web apps. And they’re great at rewriting existing stuff. Just give them a well scoped /goal and go get coffee. Theres lots of open questions about the future of our profession in the age of AI. But, playing with opus and fable, I think the future will be bright for our users. There is no reason any more for teams to put out junk that’s worse than what…

Unfortunately the LLMs are trained on what we've made, and there's going to be a ton more React garbage[1] in the training set than there are carefully-crafted websites like the article describes, so I don't expect a decrease in overengineered, bloated junk. If anything, I predict that the fact that you can shit one out in less time than before will have a different effect: A modest increase in bloat since an LLM won…

> Unfortunately the LLMs are trained on what we've made

This.

As I’ve pointed out in other posts, I work in two languages: Swift (my main language), for native app clients, and PHP, for backend work.

I have a lot of experience, with each language (12 years for Swift, and 25, for PHP).

My experience with an LLM, is that I get very good PHP, and fairly mediocre Swift. The Swift often looks like fancy tricks, that newer enthusiasts like to demonstrate. Lots of unnecessary threading, and complex, dogmatic, overengineered approaches to simple problems.

I suspect that this has a great deal to do with the availability of high-Quality public repositories. PHP is more than twice as old as Swift, and, by nature, is a much more open language.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#542

Post by lenkite »

faangguyindia wrote: post #50

Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite. I've found it's enough for most projects. One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup: 1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both…

> I wonder why there isn't a mobile OS that simply lets you build apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and gives you reliable storage without all this effort.

There WAS. Firefox OS phone! HTML+CS+JS apps! But Mozilla kicked it to the graveyard even though it was very popular in third world nations. I guess it was not $$$$$ enough for the Mozilla CEO of that era.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#543

Post by thedays »

em-bee wrote: post #488
OskarS wrote: post #165

As 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,…

my most recent website is fully static html and css. it contains several pages and a menu that is duplicated in all pages. that menu is maintained manually, and every time a page is added, all copies of the menu have to be updated. at some point that will get tedious. then i have a few options: i generate the menu using a backend framework. the downside: the website is no longer fully static. i now depend on a backen…

This seems like a very complicated way to maintain a menu on a static website. Have you considered using old school server side includes? It’s what they were designed for.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#545

Post by bronkic »

chao- wrote: post #239
opem wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think they have a legit skill issue here and should they be better off upskilling themselves? This is a direct effect of being a low barrier industry to enter. Most of the ppl among us are mostly here because of a good paycheck. And it SUCKS!

>Don't you think they have a legit skill issue here and should they be better off upskilling themselves? Absolutely agree! Just because I understand how they got there doesn't mean I think it's a good state of affairs ;) My post was already quite long, and I didn't want to append a treatise on what one should do when encountering those engineers. It depends on many details. Avoid hiring them, if that's a power you ha…

Why should you necessarily avoid hiring them? You yourself said that they are not stupid. Maybe some of them are very good, hardworking employees. And if all your company needs is a react app, does it matter that much that those people are unfamiliar with building websites without react? Maybe they've spent all their working hours doing work for their employer's company, leaving no time to learn other ways of building websites.

The thing is, people often assume that bootcampers/self-taught devs are only in it for the money and do not "care about the craft", or else they would have studied CS in the first place. But this is not true: There are many reasons why someone could have found their passion for software engineering only later in life. Some of the best engineers I know are self-taught or bootcampers.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#547

Post by Mystery-Machine »

What a great article!

> Shipping them 20MB of javascript before we even render a form would be a ridiculous thing to do.

> I have seen teams waste person-months of effort wrangling React validation libraries.

> It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies.

> Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.

The other day I added a fix so that the website would work in a PS5. Before that I didn’t even know that PS5 has a browser.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#548

Post by arnorhs »

arkmm wrote: post #407
arnorhs wrote: post #212

This post is good, and it's a great example of taking a problem and solving it with the appropriate tech with the right amount of depth. It really helps to have full domain knowledge of your customers as well. However, I do not like how it is framed as "simple html is better than react" - because you could just as well have told the same story as a react developer. (Nb. I could go on forever about the complexities an…

Seems like LLMs embrace that last point as well.

I think you might be on to something there

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#549

Post by TonyStr »

Izkata wrote: post #230
sorenjan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality.

Ages ago when writing.com was first modernizing its site, they started by hiding story content to display a spinner, waiting a second or two, then re-displaying the content. It was on the page the whole time, they just made it look like it was loading in the background.

I remember doing this as a kid making my first website. I thought it looked more "professional"
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