I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#61

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:01 AM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #45

omarhaneef wrote: post #28

The author complains that developers argue about their tools and methods, insist on their favorite techniques, but produce (more) worse apps. Particularly for the amount of time and effort expended on developing the apps. The thing is: the debates aren’t naive. They’re exactly trying to workout the details. When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows…

The problem of which DB to use is one that can be figured out ahead of time with even modest attention to more rigorous engineering practice. But that’s not what webdevs the subject of this article do. They play guess-and-check games like they are 15th century engineers building a bridge, because they have hacker mentalities instead of engineer mentalities. Not to mention the cult of celebrity and fad following in th…

The analogies to civil engineering are strained. Sure there is some truth to what you are saying, but also requirements for civil engineering projects tend to be more easily stated at a high level and are depending on the unchanging and unforgiving laws of physics plus some slowly growing list of available materials and construction processes. Everyone understands intuitively that bridges are expensive and you can't just change requirements on a whim without potentially blowing up the whole project and starting over.

Software on the other hand can be made to do anything, we can change it any time, and the technical requirements for scale and functionality are hard to predict ahead of time. Trying to apply civil engineering mentality to software results in a process that is too slow and gets beaten by hacker mentality every time.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#62

Post by blacksmith_tb » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:07 AM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #60

iratewizard wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a strong suspicion that there would be more productivity if the bottom half of developer (or more) left the industry. Control for seniority, of course. The majority of 1Xers produce outright bad code, contribute disproportionately to tech debt, don't read user stories thoroughly, don't test their code properly, and generally get in everyone else's way. The most productive thing our industry could do is creat…

> anonymous blacklist of devs to avoid and code samples of their shit work. Sounds like Github Copilot.

Hmm, just need to fork it and call it "Nopilot" (though personally I find Copilot to be sometimes handy, it makes plausible guesses when I am doing something repetitive, I'm sure that's because my code isn't DRY enough etc. but it saves me a little time)

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#63

Post by dieortin » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:13 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #56

travisgriggs wrote: post #40

> They keep encountering highly flawed websites or web apps and are assuming that regular web devs can do something about it. This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. I was excited over the last few decades to see the field of programmers swell. I have always loved the craft of good software development. I was…

> This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. sigh We have hardware doing billions of instructions per second, capable of transporting at least 500Mb/s within my computer, 120+Hz screens and yet: - Windows 10 desktop -> opening Start menu = 5 seconds wait. A trite example but once you look it is everywhere . This…

The start menu opens instantly in my computer, so that problem isn’t universal.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#64

Post by pketh » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

anamexis wrote: post #35

pketh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to focusing/blurring on a textarea/input? (Eg when clicking a card and then it’s text?)

Sorry, I think I misspoke, I meant the hover/unhover when mousing over cards, and in particular unhover.

Ah ic, are they jittery in the sense that they’re skipping/dropping frames or moving unexpectedly fast?

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#65

Post by pketh » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:16 AM UTC

Hammershaft wrote: post #34

pketh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which animations? I def would want to fix/tweak that

The ghost logo anchored to the top left jitters when flicking/scrolling using a mobile phone. Otherwise it's an awesome site, the wii shop remix still puts a grin on my face

The header and footer, including the logo hide on mobile during scroll because mobile safari doesn’t send enough info to position them accurately during flicks. Are you seeing flickering on iOS or android?

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#66

Post by carapace » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

Web dev is solved: Elm.

Just use Elm. https://elm-lang.org/

Javascript is going to be more expensive and more hassle to use than Elm for 99.999% of web apps.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#67

Post by cebert » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:34 AM UTC

hoten wrote: post #51

dgb23 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very specific kind of performance. It doesn't measure long running apps, interactions and visualizations. When you play a video game you might have to download and install it first, which might take quite a while, but we don't say "this game has bad performance" because of that. Lighthouse measures that first second or first few seconds after you visit a site at position 0/0. It doesn't care about how much blo…

(Note: I work on Lighthouse). > Lighthouse measures that first second or first few seconds after you visit a site at position 0/0. It doesn't care about how much bloat comes after you scroll. It discourages you to pre-load resources (including JS and CSS) which you don't _immediately_ need for that first hit. This is true - or rather, was true. We're making lots of progress on a mode to measure performance beyond the…

Thanks for the work you and your team are doing. Lighthouse, while not perfect, is a helpful tool. It sounds like it would be a fun project to work on.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#68

Post by noahtallen » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:35 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #50

jasonpbecker wrote: post #22

Just an observation: the native apps that are better are built on massive, proprietary frameworks developed by platform owners. In some ways, most of the web frameworks are trying to be the One True Web Platform Framework that similarly makes it possible for developers to make better web apps the way that say, AppKit or UIKit makes that possible on Apple's platforms. So I'm left wondering, did the frameworks fail or…

Until or unless something equivalent to those platform frameworks becomes part of the browser, the situation won’t change significantly. The fact is that the current interface between web app and browser, that is, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and WASM), is highly inadequate for productivity applications.

I think “highly inadequate” is a big exaggeration. As an example, many people are fairly productive on slack. (Arguably more productive than email.) Native slack is nearly equivalent to web. Another example is google sheets or google docs.

I do agree native had some big benefits. Probably the biggest hindrance to web is that you’re basically downloading the binary from the server and then executing it in line. That leads to a ton of performance optimizations (like optimizing bundle size or async loading things) which make things fairly complicated (webpack) and can also lead to UX compromises. None of which is a problem for native apps.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#69

Post by cyber_kinetist » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #61

sidlls wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of which DB to use is one that can be figured out ahead of time with even modest attention to more rigorous engineering practice. But that’s not what webdevs the subject of this article do. They play guess-and-check games like they are 15th century engineers building a bridge, because they have hacker mentalities instead of engineer mentalities. Not to mention the cult of celebrity and fad following in th…

The analogies to civil engineering are strained. Sure there is some truth to what you are saying, but also requirements for civil engineering projects tend to be more easily stated at a high level and are depending on the unchanging and unforgiving laws of physics plus some slowly growing list of available materials and construction processes. Everyone understands intuitively that bridges are expensive and you can't…

Software is also limited by the laws of physics, which is the actual hardware (silicon) it’s running on. Things like CPU clock speed, IPC, memory latency and throughput are all constrained by things like the speed of light, capacitor physics, current status of silicon technology and manufacturing, etc.

So when a web app performs sluggish on commodity devices, it’s because the devs haven’t put thought into the actual physical constraints of CPU and memory. It’s just plain bad engineering.

(You might say that the whole browser DOM/JS model is at fault, but then that’s bad engineering for the Web spec designers. To be fair though, things like the DOM and JS were invented about 3 decades ago at the time when computer performance was increasing so fast that people really didn’t think about these constraints seriously. Nowadays things are different, and these initial design decisions are biting us…)

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#70

Post by chefandy » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 3:54 AM UTC

iratewizard wrote: post #53

jdougan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the dev pool of 2022 was like the dev pool of (for example) 1994, just larger, you would have been right. But the software goldrush came and attracted many more who were just in it for the money or just weren't as thoughtful. Scale matters, upscaling people is hard.

I've got a strong suspicion that there would be more productivity if the bottom half of developer (or more) left the industry. Control for seniority, of course. The majority of 1Xers produce outright bad code, contribute disproportionately to tech debt, don't read user stories thoroughly, don't test their code properly, and generally get in everyone else's way. The most productive thing our industry could do is creat…

Really? I think the most productive thing the industry could do is get rid of developers who drastically overvalue their own work, methods, and ideas, haughtily dismiss the value of others’ contributions out of hand, and blame everyone else for a project’s shortcomings. You can usually ID them by their persistently rolled eyes, big fish in small pond mentality, and 1.9 septillion reputation on Stack Overflow.