It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#2Same.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#3I prefer the workflow that the author does, minus the Jquery just so I can maintain some street cred. document.querySelector solved 90% of what jquery solved for me anyhow. For consulting clients, I've done plenty of what I consider the "exotic workflows".
My determination is that the primary benefits of react, angular, et al is that they organically create hierarchies among a group of multiple developers. It also creates a sense of depersonalization / derealization that helps everyone feel like they're working on their own while they're surrounded by people. Woe the walls we build!
Proxy was the nail in the coffin for ever using a framework in my personal projects again. I'll still use whatever your hip new project leader wants for money though.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#4I’m not even kidding, this is how I still make websites:
I open a text editor, and stub this out (by hand, it only takes like 30 seconds — I’ll even do it as I write this post to be authentic — except stinkin’ tab doesn’t work here):
I code stuff with my bare hands
Hi there
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; box-sizing: border-box; }
body {
font-size: 18px;
color: #333;
}
p {
line-height: 1.4em;
}
Having tried CSS frameworks like Bootstrap on the one hand and vanilla HTML/CSS on the other, I really don't see the attraction of frameworks.
It's not hard to quickly build something that works decently without prefabricated components. In the later phases of a project, I find it much easier to maintain a code base free of third party material.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#5For web sties this makes sense, but what about applications that happen to run in the browser. There must be a certain size / number of contributors where this no longer is the best option?
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#6I’m not even kidding, this is how I still make websites: I open a text editor, and stub this out (by hand, it only takes like 30 seconds — I’ll even do it as I write this post to be authentic — except stinkin’ tab doesn’t work here): I code stuff with my bare hands Hi there Then I open a new tab and make a CSS file; something like this: * { margin: 0; padding: 0; box-sizing: border-box; } body { font-size: 18px; colo…
I am interested in learning this style but keep getting drawn into some frameworks. What order would you recommend learning to create sites in this style?
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#7Great article, but the takeaway is something so profound I fear a lot of people will miss it entirely when getting into the details.
It is:
Understand your tools.
And a second but equally important takeaway is:
Use the least amount of tooling to implement your functionality.
If you understand your tools and you use the least amount of tooling in order to implement your functionality, your website or app will be easier to maintain, more performant, possibly more secure (less code = smaller surface area of bugs and other problems to exploit), and it will train future developers in a more sane art of programming.
I recently inherited a codebase that was a monstrous combination of a Rails backend broken out into multiple namespaced modules + a giant grabbag of service objects + a React front-end with a shocking number of various components — all to accomplish a relevantly small number of basic web app-ish things. (And to top it all off, it was a failed product and I'm only working on it now because a biz dev friend of mine had purchased the product from the original devs.)
All that extra "web-scale" work…for a product that didn't even succeed. They probably could have halved their dev time with a vanilla Rails app and some simple JS sprinkled on top (Stimulus for example), it would have worked perfectly fine, and they would have proven the app in the market (or not). Wait to get a thousand paying users — THEN rewrite with whatever fancy-pants frontend framework and microservices backend you like.
We really need to do a better job as an industry of pushing back against complex tools and complex development processes until they're absolutely necessary. Don't reach for a jackhammer when a chisel will do just fine.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#8For web sties this makes sense, but what about applications that happen to run in the browser. There must be a certain size / number of contributors where this no longer is the best option?
The key is that modal number of contributors is probably 1.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#9Erh, I did the same for small personal websites but maintaining the content and having to change things on multiple pages made me switch to a build step. I do not understand how the author would deliver a website to clients without pulling in content from a (headless) CMS.
Re: It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with My Bare Hands
#10I’m not even kidding, this is how I still make websites: I open a text editor, and stub this out (by hand, it only takes like 30 seconds — I’ll even do it as I write this post to be authentic — except stinkin’ tab doesn’t work here): I code stuff with my bare hands Hi there Then I open a new tab and make a CSS file; something like this: * { margin: 0; padding: 0; box-sizing: border-box; } body { font-size: 18px; colo…
If you use a project generator like Next.js or Gatsby you can have a project with the advantages of React that also compiles down to static files with only one line of setup. Imo it's just as easy as what the author does except it also comes with optimizations like pre-fetching.