Derpelopment   page 3   random order

22ms here. 22ms there. "Focused on human perception" here, "Focused on human perception" there.

And suddenly we have what is basically a supercomputer unable to perform anything without lag.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119563

Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

Alan Kay

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Originally advertising was designed around the premise of explicitly highlighting utility and functionality of goods/content. It wasn't until Bernays came along and adapted his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories into practice by designing advertising to manipulate people into believing that they actually need the product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37070274

I fear that most authors (and most creators of images and links) are not knowledgeable enough to see the web's shortcomings and that it will be very hard to explain the shortcoming to them -- with the result that most authors will continue to consider their job to be done once they have put their writings (and images and links) on the web.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137263

I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.

So far I also survived:

- xml is the future

- let's use nosql for all the things

- you must use the same language at the back and front

- yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)

- yes, your home page must be an SPA

- you can't code anything without async

- you can't live without a message queue

- everything must become a micro service

- of course you need a container for that

- of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers

- of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself

- dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!

- dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!

Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36429671

At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:

"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"

"Uh... Yes?"

"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37573074

Right now, in nearly all industries, and even in parts of tech, you become a manager, by being manager-like. That means playing politics and going to business school. Deeper understanding or appreciation of the job isn't really necessary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35014823

I'm a self-taught developer at global market leader company. I worked on the business side for years and built quite a few internal apps end-to-end completely alone. I had no choice but to follow good practice to maintain them alone.

I was quite reluctant to join the dev team, it never had a good reputation, but eventually decided to give it a go. Agile and estimations, spill overs, etc is such a pain in the ass, it feels like a pseudo-science. A lot of people spend a lot of energy on just this administration while we are way behind on many other things, like proper unit testing, good quality documentation, well established CI/CD. And everybody is focusing so much on the estimates, tickets like this was the end goal. I want to change their approach but there's a long way to go.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36352189

I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366520

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the solutions don’t work very well means they’re constantly being reinvented, which means if you do the work to keep up with it all you’re rewarded by being regarded as an expert, which is nice.

Lastly, I wouldn’t underestimate how this has built up slowly over time, and therefore how many people just don’t know any better.

Last year I assigned a feature to a junior dev which was quite simple. He spent two days hunting for and testing react libraries to try and build it. When he told me this I said, “Holy crap, that is overkill.” I tried to explain how easy this would be with just plain HTML and JavaScript and he didn’t understand, so we paired for about 90 minutes and the work was done.

At the end of that session this developer said to me, “wow, I didn’t realize you could actually do anything useful with just plain JavaScript in the browser. I thought it was like... assembly or something.”

This is a good, very productive, very fast-learning developer I’m talking about. He literally had never tried to use the DOM api, and didn’t realize it was, you know, useful.

I think there’s a lot of that in front end world today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137873