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I think one nuance is lost on both articles: web-development is generally stuck in a system where all the incentives are wrong. - The developers want to prove

I think one nuance is lost on both articles: web-development is generally stuck in a system where all the incentives are wrong. - The developers want to prove themselves with a new technology - The site owner wants to make money, so adds are required - The website needs to "verify identity" to cut down on fraud, so invasive trackers are added - The finance team wants to cut down on infrastructure costs, so they want less done on the servers - The user wants to do what they came for done, but may be frustrated by how the site slows down the browser This tug-of-war is a lot of what leads to slow, resource-intensive, privacy-invading websites.

duxup 6y ago
I think that first item is true about ... a lot of careers. Resume driven development isn't an exclusively web thing.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  I think it's more prominent and damaging there on account of all the churn, combined with large amounts of stupid money. Mobile native developer? Might be something new you want to get familiar with every couple years, but really you'll likely be OK, career-wise, if you sleep on it for another year or two unless you actually need it. C++ developers aren't chasing brand-new frameworks to stay hirable, generally. Java and C#, most of the ads seem to be "have experience with [eight-year-old 'new' thing that's basically an ecosystem-wide standard now anyway], plus a bunch of much older things", and those two alone are a really high percentage of all software jobs.
clarry 6y ago
And the industry at large has completely disregarded browsers and demoted them to being mere thin clients for accessing applications. Just why can't we improve the user agent instead of turning every website into an app that does its own thing to provide the UX? For example: > We can kick off requests as soon as the user first touches (or hovers) the link instead There's no reason this couldn't be built-in to the user agent. It could very well pre-load pages before you even start scrolling around, or it could start loading as soon as you hover, or it could start loading as soon as you click. I get to decide, because I can configure my UA. People on data caps will be happy to turn it off. Meanwhile you can optimize your ugly slow service so that it processes requests fast enough that you don't need these hacks.. > We can provide better visual feedback that loading is taking place Usually I get either crickets or a spinner or something went wrong if it's the javascript doing this. Again I think it is the user agent's place to give the user visual feedback (according to their configuration). I'd turn them off, because they're not useful. I'd rather have you spend time making your ugly slow service faster than implementing transition animations to "hide" the latency.
ksec 6y ago
Not sure why this isn't the top comment. Pretty much sums up the problem with current Web Development.

duxup 6y ago

I think that first item is true about ... a lot of careers. Resume driven development isn't an exclusively web thing.

karatestomp 6y ago
I think it's more prominent and damaging there on account of all the churn, combined with large amounts of stupid money. Mobile native developer? Might be something new you want to get familiar with every couple years, but really you'll likely be OK, career-wise, if you sleep on it for another year or two unless you actually need it. C++ developers aren't chasing brand-new frameworks to stay hirable, generally. Java and C#, most of the ads seem to be "have experience with [eight-year-old 'new' thing that's basically an ecosystem-wide standard now anyway], plus a bunch of much older things", and those two alone are a really high percentage of all software jobs.

clarry 6y ago

And the industry at large has completely disregarded browsers and demoted them to being mere thin clients for accessing applications. Just why can't we improve the user agent instead of turning every website into an app that does its own thing to provide the UX? For example: > We can kick off requests as soon as the user first touches (or hovers) the link instead There's no reason this couldn't be built-in to the user agent. It could very well pre-load pages before you even start scrolling around, or it could start loading as soon as you hover, or it could start loading as soon as you click. I get to decide, because I can configure my UA. People on data caps will be happy to turn it off. Meanwhile you can optimize your ugly slow service so that it processes requests fast enough that you don't need these hacks.. > We can provide better visual feedback that loading is taking place Usually I get either crickets or a spinner or something went wrong if it's the javascript doing this. Again I think it is the user agent's place to give the user visual feedback (according to their configuration). I'd turn them off, because they're not useful. I'd rather have you spend time making your ugly slow service faster than implementing transition animations to "hide" the latency.

ksec 6y ago

Not sure why this isn't the top comment. Pretty much sums up the problem with current Web Development.