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From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

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Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#71

Post by mind-blight »

mmckelvy wrote: post #67
mind-blight wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge remix fan. Remix, Shadcn, postgres, and Prisma have been great for rapid development

Agreed, minus the Primsa.

Honestly, I hated Prisma for the longest time. Like, hated it. I tried to rip it out of projects multiple times. Why would you build a node library in Rust? (as one of many problems) But, I had a mental shift recently that helped me appreciate it more: I use Prisma only for features that fit neatly into an simple ORM (i.e. building a web page based on a bunch of joins). Anything else, I use raw SQL.

They released TypedSql (https://www.prisma.io/docs/orm/prisma-client/using-raw-sql/t...) which is heavily inspired by PgTyped. That lets me write raw Postgres SQL that's converted into TypeScript. The other things I do:

- If I want derived data, write views that encapsulate the transform. Prisma supports reading from views - If I need something more complex, use DuckDB + python for analysis and write to the appropriate table. - If I need to cache complex queries, just use a materialized view and read it as a prisma object

It's not perfect, but that let's me use prisma for what it's good at (Managing an ORM and deeply nested queries), then fall back into raw SQL for everything else.

Going straight to SQL has been a breath of fresh air, but, let's be honest, dealing with deeply nested joins really sucks when all you want to do is build a page that shows a company, all of it's people, and all of those people's relationships. ORMs are pretty handy for that last case, and I use SQL for everything else

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#72

Post by CharlieDigital »

mind-blight wrote: post #71
mmckelvy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, minus the Primsa.

Honestly, I hated Prisma for the longest time. Like, hated it. I tried to rip it out of projects multiple times. Why would you build a node library in Rust? (as one of many problems) But, I had a mental shift recently that helped me appreciate it more: I use Prisma only for features that fit neatly into an simple ORM (i.e. building a web page based on a bunch of joins). Anything else, I use raw SQL. They released Typ…

Check out Kysley: https://kysely.dev/

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#73

Post by hallman76 »

Gatsby gets shit on a lot - which I think is a but unfair. I find it to be a solid, well-documented platform. It has some rough spots, but show me a platform that doesn't.

The author also complains that:

> I couldn’t build the site locally or upgrade dependencies, leaving it outdated since 2019

This is true of many things in the javascript ecosystem. In react/node/js-land you HAVE to invest in maintenance (and re-writes) or be left with a legacy codebase that just might not work one day if npm install fails.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#74

Post by mind-blight »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #72
mind-blight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I hated Prisma for the longest time. Like, hated it. I tried to rip it out of projects multiple times. Why would you build a node library in Rust? (as one of many problems) But, I had a mental shift recently that helped me appreciate it more: I use Prisma only for features that fit neatly into an simple ORM (i.e. building a web page based on a bunch of joins). Anything else, I use raw SQL. They released Typ…

Check out Kysley: https://kysely.dev/

I've looked into it a bit. I'm getting to the point where I either want to use a full ORM, or I want to write raw SQL and have it checked against the database.

Query builders are nice, but they sometimes end up in this middle ground where they have the worst parts of an ORM (needing to learn a new syntax and not getting access to all the DB features) and the worst parts of raw SQL (Unpacking relationships into objects w/ pointers is error prone boilerplate that sucks to write).

I love SqlAlchemy since it's still enough of an ORM to solve the main problem I want solved. Super curious to hear if you've had good experiences with Keysley and how it deals with transforming relationships into objects

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#75

Post by swyx »

yen223 wrote: post #59
com2kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

I lived through the times when you had to pay lots of money for software tooling. As a kid from a third-world country, I don't share the same rosy sentiment towards those times. It's too easy to take for granted, but modern-day free open-source tooling is a godsend for a lot of folks out there.

until it goes unmaintained because nobody pays for it

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#76

Post by com2kid »

yen223 wrote: post #59
com2kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot . During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Ba…

I lived through the times when you had to pay lots of money for software tooling. As a kid from a third-world country, I don't share the same rosy sentiment towards those times. It's too easy to take for granted, but modern-day free open-source tooling is a godsend for a lot of folks out there.

Historically software companies were smart enough to overlook piracy outside of their key markets. Plenty of poor American kids learned to program on pirated copies of visual studio.

Some point the company's got greedy and decided they want to crack down in all piracy. This shortsightedness first hit Adobe. I'd estimate that half the people who know photoshop learned it on a pirated copy. The harder Adobe makes piracy, the fewer kids teach themselves photoshop.

Microsoft, to their credit, made Visual Studio Community Edition, although IMHO they nerfed the first few releases too much.

You can view commercial software with overlooked piracy as a form of the rich subsidizing everyone else.

Again it is unfortunate that companies got greedy and tore the system down for a one time boost in revenue.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#77

Post by CSSer »

vladgur wrote: post #25
swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

I am for one surprised that the initial concept of Gatsby -- a static site generator with React, GraphQL and other hype words of late 2010s -- was actually able to raise $40+ million dollars to build a platform for what to me at the time seemed incredibly over-engineered stack for static html pages and an unproven founder. It was truly a testament of times

RIP ZIRP. Kyle was cool and had the right attitude about a lot of things. He built some great frontend tooling e.g. fontsource, without locking it into his larger projects like Vercel did. That was very altruistic. Regardless, yeah, I couldn’t believe it when Gatsby got its seed round. It was a wild time.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#78

Post by ayuhito »

CSSer wrote: post #77
vladgur wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am for one surprised that the initial concept of Gatsby -- a static site generator with React, GraphQL and other hype words of late 2010s -- was actually able to raise $40+ million dollars to build a platform for what to me at the time seemed incredibly over-engineered stack for static html pages and an unproven founder. It was truly a testament of times

RIP ZIRP. Kyle was cool and had the right attitude about a lot of things. He built some great frontend tooling e.g. fontsource, without locking it into his larger projects like Vercel did. That was very altruistic. Regardless, yeah, I couldn’t believe it when Gatsby got its seed round. It was a wild time.

Kyle is a great guy. Just to correct the timeline a little bit, I only created Fontsource after its predecessor, Typefaces (which was made by Kyle), was left abandoned when Gatsby took off.

I wouldn’t say he made Typefaces specifically for the Gatsby ecosystem, but he definitely had the hacker mindset for creating frontend tooling for a while.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#79

Post by CSSer »

ayuhito wrote: post #78
CSSer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIP ZIRP. Kyle was cool and had the right attitude about a lot of things. He built some great frontend tooling e.g. fontsource, without locking it into his larger projects like Vercel did. That was very altruistic. Regardless, yeah, I couldn’t believe it when Gatsby got its seed round. It was a wild time.

Kyle is a great guy. Just to correct the timeline a little bit, I only created Fontsource after its predecessor, Typefaces (which was made by Kyle), was left abandoned when Gatsby took off. I wouldn’t say he made Typefaces specifically for the Gatsby ecosystem, but he definitely had the hacker mindset for creating frontend tooling for a while.

Thank you for that correction! I had to google to find the name because I was fuzzy on it. Your last paragraph matches my recall. The point I was trying to make was that I appreciated that Typefaces wasn’t automatically part of Gatsby just because of Kyle’s affiliation.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#80

Post by MikeTheGreat »

com2kid wrote: post #54
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of , because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including ". In this case, is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration…

Silverlight's real usage was rapid internal corporate app development. Internal tools basically. It is hard to describe exactly how absurdly popular Silverlight was at the time within corporations. Microsoft had a big internal political battle and did the stupidest thing possible and abandoned Silveright, which pissed off a LOT of companies, who then started building internal web apps instead. This lead to a slow mig…

Thanks for the reply! That was very illuminating!

I remember Access + SQL Server being popular, and ASP/ASPX being popular, and Visual Studio experience being easy + popular, and never quite understood why everyone switched to the web stack.

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