Derpelopment   page 5   random order

People blame developers but it's all driven by a product mentality that favors rapid iterations and technical debt to run business experiments on customers. Slow-and-steady, carefully written software isn't tolerated within many product orgs these days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229852

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 If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most.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

.. we're just writing too much code. Companies have hundreds of millions of lines of code in production right now and nobody who knows how it works, and what we're doing is a kind of runaway train where we're just hiring more and more people to write more and more code, and trying to ramp education up to be able to produce more and more people, and - I can only say this from the sidelines, as I don't have a degree - we seem to, at least as per these individuals, be cheapening computer science at the (possibly indirect) behest of these businesses who aren't willing or able to step back and try things differently.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ ... st_in_the_bazaar/g1022gc/

Isn't it weird that we have entire companies like Intercom or Rasa whose value add is pushing automated, AI-driven "assistants" onto websites, and then the companies that buy into that entire value add and codebases hacked on by ML experts find that none of it even works better than how it was in 1998?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063525

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

We run these applications in cloud-native environments with virtual displays and stream the video directly to the browser while the user's input context (mouse, keyboard, etc) is forwarded to these applications in near real-time. The platform has a very generous free plan for all free applications and as we improve our cloud we intend to make all free applications fully free always.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27904272

I don't think the user population is aware how disingenuous all of this tech crap is. It could be so awesome, and they don't even understand what's not awesome about it. It hurts in a deep, emotional space.

I have found so much inspiration in some of the great programmers of two generations ago. The writings of Chuck Moore and Alan Kay convince me that we somehow took two orders of magnitude of backwards steps in creating the present milieu of dysfunctional technology.

The worst part, IMO, is that it's all opaque. I don't control the device that I hold in my hand. I can't fix it because Google or Apple don't want me to. It is a tool of economic and social control, not a powerful technology that I can wield.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ ... st_in_the_bazaar/g10l3ui/

The whole IT ecosystem has become a hail mary. Even admins usually have no idea what a certain program actually wants to do. If the admin knows how to install the app so that it actually runs, you call them a good admin.

From a security point of view, an application is like a nuclear power plant. It's good if it works as planned, but if something blows up it endangers your whole enterprise.

The whole container movement can be seen as putting the apps in a sarcophagus like Chernobyl. That way the radiation hopefully stays in, but history has shown that it really doesn't. Also, the wheel of history has just turned one more iteration and now admins just view the sarcophagus as something you deploy as you previously deployed the app. Who is responsible that it is air tight? Well, uh, nobody, really.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31177514

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