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How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#91

Post by anonzzzies »

fifticon wrote: post #89

I have a good one(?): 1. be multiple developers on the same project. 2. for each developer, use your own tools and techniques, insist on only handling those parts of the site that you did with your tools, and insist on never fully understanding those remaining parts of the site the other devs did. This will allow for all sorts of fun, including: - A multiple inconsistent implementations of the same thing - B even bet…

1. do all devops on the side and make sure everything is running complex multi az kubernetes clusters with as many aws buzzword services you managed to read when you asked gpt 'how super secure aws k8s for complex 900 node nextjs microservice setup thanks!'.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#92

Post by 1dom »

I feel personally attacked. I love it.

Here's some more:

- People only visit your personal website knowing they can personally read, understand, audit and approve every single line of code that ever went into it. This means you don't really have a personal website unless you meticulously wrote every single line and every single change is clearly described and accessible on github (and sourcehut, and forgejo, and the rest. What sort of monster uses only Github nowadays?)

- Remember to explain every single self-doubting existential thought that went into producing (or not producing) your website: people aren't there for objective, intellectual, educational tech content, they're probably more interested in self-deprecating metacognition.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#93

Post by lmpdev »

rglullis wrote: post #65
lmpdev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the inverse though Things like Wordpress sound super simple - you don’t even need to code! But you do need to worry about managing an entire Apache server, managing a crappy database, hardcoding bullshit in PHP, cronjobs, cloud deployment and the fact that almost all “features” of it like plugins and themes etc are massive security vulnerabilities I think the pitfall to avoid ITT is that there’s a single source…

If the problem you are trying to solve is "I need to put content online and have a storefront for my product", there are plenty of hosting providers who will happily take care of all the headache from Wordpress for less than $10/month.

I’m aware but the OP was about “Making websites”

I was mainly providing an alternate example to “over-engineering is the only source of complexity” train of thought this thread largely has

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#94

Post by presentation »

jeswin wrote: post #71

> Always, Always Require a Compilation Step And from the linked post on the same website. > if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Very (very, very) few large projects use plain JS (instead of TS) these days. Let's stop acting like all these people don't know what they're doing. This post is probably applicable to selected tiny and small projects. And…

It’s also mostly applicable to those inexperienced at web development, who write 99% of the posts and comments along these lines.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#95

Post by namenotrequired »

bapak wrote: post #40
aktuel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own code doesn't break without me working on it.

Correct. It's broken by default because you're the only user and worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago. Probably wrote no tests for it. Compare that to something like jQuery where all the edge cases have already been accounted for 10 years ago.

If I worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago then it’s definitely not taking lots of time and energy

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#96

Post by 1dom »

rckt wrote: post #33

The post feels more like a rant, like the author has a beef with some sort of a project or a client. Even a static blog is easier to manage with tools rather than writing it in pure HTML. I have my personal website running on svelte. When I decided to have a blog, I quickly came up with a solution to use markdown to html converter and just added a couple of routes to existing setup and voila, the blog is up and runni…

You're clearly a better person than the author then.

They said at the start they were going on personal experience. I relate deeply to what they're saying: it's most definitely not a rant/beef against another project/client, it's most definitely the learnings of someone who's been producing personal websites for decades, has kicked themselves a few times in the process and can sarcastically poke fun at their journey in front of others.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#97

Post by rahimnathwani »

Scarblac wrote: post #62
superasn wrote: post #38

Always use ORMs and then spend the next year debugging N+1 queries, bloated joins, and mysterious performance issues that only show up in prod. Migrations randomly fail, schema changes are a nightmare, and your team forgets how SQL works. ORMs promise to abstract the database but end up being just another layer you have to fight when things go wrong.

I always see this sentiment here but I just havent experienced any of it in 14 years with the Django ORM.

You've never had to use

  .extra()

?

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#98

Post by rglullis »

lmpdev wrote: post #93
rglullis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem you are trying to solve is "I need to put content online and have a storefront for my product", there are plenty of hosting providers who will happily take care of all the headache from Wordpress for less than $10/month.

I’m aware but the OP was about “Making websites” I was mainly providing an alternate example to “over-engineering is the only source of complexity” train of thought this thread largely has

To me it seems like a distinction without a difference.

If you can "make a website" by using a third-party provider but instead you opt into running wordpress on your own, you are still over-engineering.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#99

Post by bubblyworld »

brabel wrote: post #58
bubblyworld wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for the random snark? I mean, again, we're in extremely obvious territory here. Just doesn't seem appropriate for hacker news front-page (to me).

You don’t get to decide that, the people voting on HN do, they did and they disagree with you, just accept you can’t agree with a large set of people all the time.

Absolutely, everybody gets their say here.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#100

Post by cardanome »

jeswin wrote: post #71

> Always, Always Require a Compilation Step And from the linked post on the same website. > if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Very (very, very) few large projects use plain JS (instead of TS) these days. Let's stop acting like all these people don't know what they're doing. This post is probably applicable to selected tiny and small projects. And…

I have seen companies that had ten times as many microservices than devs, our industry is full of cargo culting, ignorance and resume driven development.

While there is sometimes good reason to use TS, often you might be better served using JSDoc so you have type safety without the compilation step.

I currently see the direct comparison as my company has one project that uses old-school php backed rendering with a bit of vanilla js sprinkled it and one with modern React and TS. The React team is significantly less productive and the code is much harder to maintain, has more bugs, is less performant and harder ton onboard people to. But when I suggest that a new project does not not need to be a SPA, I always get booed.

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