Live data from Hacker News

There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

71–80 of 337 posts

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. You can't replicate experience. Everything you just wrote about with data types, invariants, and decorators is just flavor which you only have control over in your own personal code however as soon as you interact with web browser APIs, nodejs, and 3rd party libraries all that goes out the window and you end up conforming to other people's patterns. In my honest opinion Typescript is a fad. You're still j…

Web browser API's usually do keep their invariants. I wouldn't use libraries which don't. Libraries which do not support TypeScript will vanish. See, all your experience (in a limited field) is telling you the wrong thing. And it is quite obvious to me that you need to know BOTH TypeScript and Javascript, of course, you cannot just learn TypeScript, because it is just a thin layer on top of Javascript without many ru…

> See, all your experience (in a limited field) is telling you the wrong thing.

You seem to be conflating objective wrong/right with your own personal stance. Do you have an objective argument in favor of your assertion about the longevity of non-TS libs?

> And it is quite obvious to me that you need to know BOTH TypeScript and Javascript

That's a reasonable strategy on the assumption that TypeScript will be used, but the very fact of its being so is actually an argument in favor of the point made by gp which has been left unaddressed (RE context-switching).

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#72

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

> Of course you can choose to put your website on AWS and svck on the bolls of Jeff a little. But you don't have to! And that's what all kinds of young devs just miss. Where are you hosting your websites?

Can't speak for OP, but mine are on vultr. There's a whole industry of web hosting, virtual private servers, or colocation facilities to choose from.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#74
> Tailwind CSS is a design system token generator

This exact quote beautifully sums up Tailwind and should explain part of the "Why?" of Tailwind to those that do not understand why you don't just write plain old CSS instead.

Yes, you'll have to learn some new tokens in lieu of simply writing CSS statements. But what you get with Tailwind is a utility-oriented design system that allows you to put constraints on your design. These constraints add consistency to your design. With Tailwind (and similar frameworks/libraries) you get these constraints and the following consistency cheap. With plain CSS you need to actively work to put constraints on your design (e.g. building out a design system using CSS variables). There constraints are opt-in, not opt-out.

That utility based CSS frameworks like Tailwind also tend to solve specificity issues is simply a bonus.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#75
post #8

From reading this I get the sense the problems are lower level and there is no impetus to fix them. I'm embarrassed to say, having programmed for over a decade, and running Linux for half of that, I still have no idea how to setup my computer to serve a webpage (or even a file) I probably need to `apt-get install apache` and then deal with some magic config files and incantations and hope I don't mess something up an…

> Hosting webpages from home is still complicated and no progress has been made. Now this would be a real improvement, not some new framework of the week.

Glad to see it isn't just me. I've been doing networking tasks on and off for over a decade and I still fear the nginx config file.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#76

No it's not, because your website will not get traction unless you SEO the hell out of it, pay google ads, pay for FB ads, pay some blogger to write about it etc. It's impossible for a website to be found when the top spots in every search are capped by a few known players. It's easy to make a private web page, but that's not a website. In fact the best time was about 2005, when most current day's media sites started…

> "...your website will not get traction..."

And?

Not to be glib, but you need exactly zero readers on your website to have a whale of a time making it. In terms of building a website, the tech is exactly what matters because that is where the fun is.

I fully agree with your last sentence though. It's ridiculous to think that only dynamic CMS' allow instant changes. A small static website reloads instantly. Even better, one doesn't even need the internet since you can see the updates localhost!

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#77

Pardon me, but I seem to be suffering from terminological confusion. I'm puzzled by this business of "building" static sites being a process that takes minutes. Perhaps my understanding of the term "static site" is awry; I parse it as a site consisting of HTML markup, JS and CSS, all that code being handmade, rather than generated. If that's right, then a "static" site doesn't need to be built. I presume it's suppose…

> Or are we talking about writing sites in meta-languages, that have to be subjected to a translation process to yield code suitable for browsers?

It's too laborous to handcraft each page, so people would use template engines and things like Markdown -> HTML converters so they would only edit the meaningful part of the page manually.

Some also choose to compile a dynamic site into a static site. WordPress plugins allow for that, for instance. Doing so, you get all the advantages of a dynamic CMS, while keeping the ability to serve the site as a bunch of plain HTML files. The process of compiling would be the 'build' step you are wondering about.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#78

I hate every new technology listed in this article. I recently removed all of my SQL-in-programming-language code (orm, strings of SQL) etc, and just wrote actual SQL in files with .sql at the end and load them at run-time. I am now, when my finger heels, going to do the same for the React. I hate React. I have been using it for years and I have never enjoyed it. I feel like everything made after the boomer technolog…

Wouldn't it be better to put SQL statements in stored procedures rather than dynamically loaded text files?

There's plenty of queries you may find yourself scattering throughout your application that you don't want to have in the database as a stored procedure, if for no other reason than it being overkill and extra work.

If it's business logic in the query that might get re-used across independent applications (e.g., cancelling an order), then I would think a stored procedure is better. But if it's specific to that application (e.g., fetching title+description+publication date of the five most recent blog entries for a side panel), I wouldn't care to put that in the db as a stored procedure.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#79

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

> Of course you can choose to put your website on AWS and svck on the bolls of Jeff a little. But you don't have to! And that's what all kinds of young devs just miss. Where are you hosting your websites?

Not OP, but Linode. Used to be on their $10 a month VPS, downgraded when they added the $5 a month one. I think they have some fancy Kube stuff now but I just have a makefile that rsyncs a directory to my VPS and nginx picks it up. Honestly even the $5 VPS is more power than I need for static files, but it's nice to have the option to throw up a flask app or run some web-scraping scripts overnight or something.

Admittedly it's behind Cloudflare because DDOS skiddies, but I think the CF lock-in isn't much if you're not using workers or anything proprietary to them. Admittedly it does suck for people with really privacy-customized browsers or using Tor, but idk a better solution unfortunately.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#80
I have a question.

Would someone please give me some form of enlightenment about the practice of product placement in blog posts?

Is this the new normal?

>I'm Simeon, a in and Solution Engineer @ Sanity.io

> Some major bias at play here but when I came across Sanity I finally found "the CMS I'd always hoped existed".

It is cool, that he acknowledges the "bias", but this is more in "conflict of interest" category in my humble opinion.

What do you think? I am curious.

Edit: Please, don't just downvote. I don't care about "karma". Give me some explanation.

Post reply on HN