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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#561

Post by iamsb »

Most of the hiring is geared towards what do you know instead of how do you solve problems.

I recently went to work a two big company, which is considered highly agile and progressive. I was tasked to build a pricing engine to customize prices for a static inventory of products. Number of products were about 30 and did not change month to month. The architecture suggested we use close to 18 different technologies, including caching systems, message bus, reactive programming. All to give 10 possible prices for 30 products. So essentially 300 values and a system to change the rules which determined the prices based on 3/4 parameters. I built the entire system in 2 days which was ready to be tested, but was told to scrap the work as it did not follow the internal development guidelines. Not to mention I was reprimanded for not including team and calling a complex problem trivial as it increased signaling risk internally. Apparently they are still building that system with 5 engineers, 2 analysts, 1 devops person, and 1 team lead. I left the company 2 years ago. And interestingly each and every person on the team got a promotion, multiple performance bonuses in last 2 years.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#562

Post by knocte »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

Is PHP still a thing?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#563

Post by flukus »

mattlondon wrote: post #234
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

For one-dev sized projects (i.e. simple crud type apps) this may well work. However I would be concerned about a couple of things if this were me and I was doing anything beyond the absolute most basic web app: - long term maintenance. Doing something only you understand and only you can maintain (that job security you mention) is a bit of an unprofessional dick move IMO. - if you need to get other people in to help,…

> Doing something only you understand

A simple php endpoint is something any web developer can understand. The more frameworks/libraries/patterns/abstractions you throw in the less likely it is they will understand it. Especially years later when the framework is inevitably out of date, good luck convincing why they need to spend money upgrading a framework every year.

> hey can we put Google maps in here?

Has this changed recently? Last I checked you would just drop a script tag into the page, who needs a library for that? Edit - I checked (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/guide), how does a framework make a copy/paste job any simpler?

> "we need to integrate with stripe payments"

I'm not familiar with stripe, but don't you just give it a return url? I don't see how a framework would help at all here.

> you'll need to stay 100% up to date on all security issues/approaches/classes of vulnerability to make sure your custom system is secure.

This is harder with a framework, it's one more thing to keep updated. The less libraries the less vulnerabilities.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#564

Post by prince005 »

This is like a neanderthal saying that fire is hard to build so let's eat the food raw. The time is now old man. The new frameworks are surely confusing (not complicated) to learn at first but that is because they expect you to learn a system by which the chances of you delivering a bad product gets mitigated as the lowest level components follow an accepted standard. You are learning a system, a new tool to aid in your work rather than starting from scratch every time. And if you say you don't start from scratch and have a system/set of components to reuse then, voila, you are just doing the same thing frameworks do, but in your own sweet way.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#565

Post by lmaophp »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

PHP in 2019 lmfao

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#566

Post by hnarn »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

Honestly I think it's kind of worrying that this opinion is so popular. Aren't you essentially saying that frameworks are in most cases useless, and "job security" is something you should strive after?

First of all, "job security" means that you're irreplaceable, and in the case of you actually being the architect/designer, that probably means you did a (perhaps intentionally) bad job to make yourself the linchpin. Not good.

Secondly, regardless of the first point, programming is hard. Anyone that says otherwise should be avoided like the plague. It's beyond the scope of one individual to be able to keep up to date to all the security issues and gotchas prevalent in a language or ecosystem. This is why you use frameworks. They're democratic units that within themselves handle patches and development in ways that are often better than one "irreplaceable" developer on a unique object (of course, bad developers can still use frameworks and derail the product completely to the point where all benefits of the framework are negated, but that's beside the point).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#567

Post by nightfly »

hnarn wrote: post #566
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

Honestly I think it's kind of worrying that this opinion is so popular. Aren't you essentially saying that frameworks are in most cases useless, and "job security" is something you should strive after? First of all, "job security" means that you're irreplaceable, and in the case of you actually being the architect/designer, that probably means you did a (perhaps intentionally) bad job to make yourself the linchpin. N…

In this case "job security" means their customer trusts them, not that no one else could do the job.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#568

Post by tsukikage »

orf wrote: post #59
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

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.

> Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment

"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I too have known."

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_palace.htm

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#569

Post by TeMPOraL »

nostrademons wrote: post #376
thaumaturgy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…

> "sure, that material might not be the most durable on the market, but unobtainium would have added $35 million to the project cost and ongoing maintenance costs would have gone up by another $5 million / year." > That right there is a comparison that developers can never, ever offer anyone that's writing the checks for a project. Sure they can. At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer…

> At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer should know" which included the cost in dollar terms of trading off engineer time vs. memory vs. CPU vs. network vs. user-perceived latency etc.

Could someone alert Google's web developer teams (in particular the GMail frontend team) about that cheat sheet? If released products are considered as evidence, it doesn't seem like this cheat sheet is used.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#570

Post by tsukikage »

mattlondon wrote: post #234
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

For one-dev sized projects (i.e. simple crud type apps) this may well work. However I would be concerned about a couple of things if this were me and I was doing anything beyond the absolute most basic web app: - long term maintenance. Doing something only you understand and only you can maintain (that job security you mention) is a bit of an unprofessional dick move IMO. - if you need to get other people in to help,…

> Doing something only you understand and only you can maintain

Having worked with both kinds of application, I personally find it much easier to learn my way around and understand a self-contained application than one which is a giant web of moving-target third party dependencies and frameworks, themselves largely undocumented and subject to the framework-hipster "move fast and break your users' things" mentality.

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