8 ms·

I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be t

I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be too much of an effort. Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's, at least IMHO.

stets 6y ago
Get after it! It's not too late and you don't need the latest *js to make something valuable. The effort can be worth it!
- rodolphoarruda 6y ago
  Vue.js was part of the architecture -- no kidding! But hey, thanks for the encouragement.
  - stets 6y ago
    Fuck vue.js. Launch your thing. EarlyBrd only used jinja2 templates with Flask. Now I'm migrating to laravel and only use Blade templates. Prove your thing out first because most users don't really care unless you're making some kind of real-time data analytics bs (in which case inqtel or other prob wants to send you some money)
    - pembrook 6y ago
      What did you find were the downsides of developing a product in Flask vs. Laravel? Curious as I've been debating about which direction to steer a friend who is a designer trying their build their own product. He's played around with python, and liked it, so I was going to suggest flask (since most of online tutorials start there). But I've also heard good things about PHP/Laravel for beginners.
      - stets 6y ago
        I would recommend Laravel or even Rails for a beginner over Flask. Again, with Flask I was re-writing and implementing things I didn't need to. Like hashing passwords. Or building user scaffolding. Flask fans will argue that you can do all of these. Yes...but you probably are grabbing some module and reading the docs and then messing around with it for a while. My forgotten email system in flask was a celery task running in a sidecar container and using an additional redis container for queueing and grabbing that job. In laravel that looks more like one command. `php artisan ui vue --auth`. Maybe there is a better way but I found myself struggling for a lot. Yes I didn't need to use psycopg2 and make nasty raw SQL calls because SQLAlchemy exists. SQLAlchemy isn't built in though. Django has a lot of these features and much of flask's attractiveness is in being light-weight so I guess it makes sense. Today, I'd say for solo-founders, try out Laravel > Rails > Django > Flask > everything else
    - nonines 6y ago
      Great work. I'm curious though. Why Flask and not Django? Seems like you wanted a heavyweight after all.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    You could almost still run PHP scripts from those days. The same basic architecture works you just gotta study the new DB access methods that use prepared statements instead of string concatenation/interpolation. If you used Perl, mod_perl exists and CGI.pm is available in CPAN. The CGI protocol is as viable as it ever was (though of course there are new and improved alternatives). There are a bunch of minimal stylesheets out there that get you some mobile compatibility, and no IE 6/early Firefox nightmares, so your code can actually be simpler than ever.
    - stets 6y ago
      Someone should make a contest to revive older tech like perl and make a profitable product from it. Use the oldest tech and see who can make the most valuable product
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        FYI: Perl has one of the most powerful and modern web frameworks, Mojolicious, and one of the best web form libraries, called CGI::FormBuilder. Besides that, Perl allows forward references and has moderately strong type checking. And mod_perl is the best-performing language accelerator. I cringe whenever I have to downgrade to Python.
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        I cringe whenever I have to use a language accelerator.
anderspitman 6y ago
HTML from the 90s will still run on today's browsers. Just because everyone is overcomplicating things doesn't mean you have to. If you have a great product it doesn't matter much what you use to build it.
sethammons 6y ago
to echo sibling comments: build your thing with 90's era frontend tech. A fancy UI is unlikely to be your differentiating feature. As long as it does its job, you can fix it later if it becomes successful -- hire a js expert at that point and re-do the frontend.
hckr_news 6y ago
Hey, this isn't true at all. Reading up documentation/resources, watching youtube tutorials, and even sometimes banging your head against the wall is a normal part of the software development process. Don't let the frustrations get to you. You mentioned the 90s but boy were people jerks back then (from the horror stories I read). I think today is probably the best time to be working on software with so many open source tools in addition to collaborative and helpful people you'll come across. As far as tooling goes, just keep a simple. Aim for a simple MVP. DB? Go mysql. Frontend? Choose a templating engine like EJS and css. Backend? Node/Express ecosystem would be my go to. Push it to Github. Host it on Netlify. There are some fantastic tutorials around the net to get this far. Everything else like monitoring tools, security, testing, containers are secondary to the initial MVP you can build.
- stets 6y ago
  This is good advice. Tech doesn't really matter. Yes, things will suck. But don't introduce complexity until you're absolutely sure it needs to be or that it will help you save time later on.
  - danjac 6y ago
    I've worked/consulted at quite a few places where the code quality ranged from mediocre to abysmal. These companies were launched pretty much by people with an "X for Idiots" book on their lap or who hired their teenage nephew/best mate from college to do the coding. And yet, these companies did quite well, became quite successful and profitable businesses in their niche - and when they did hit the hard limits of technical debt, they had the money to hire professionals. Unfortunately there are limits to what professionals can do with just-about-working spaghetti code and bizarre database schemas, when you can't just throw away and rewrite software that's powering a growing business that needs more new features than it needs a cleaner codebase, but nonetheless they got much further than many SaaS companies started by developers with well thought out architecture, beautiful code and the latest tech stack. The reason they were successful is that the founders lived and breathed their niche and understood the problems and their customers. They saw opportunities as well as risks and blind alleys. The tech was just a means to that end, not the end in of itself. That said, before people say "the tech doesn't matter", I think that had they the technical skills to match their domain knowledge and connections, they would have been far more successful and would not have hit those hard limits that slowed them down and perhaps prevented them from expanding further and seizing on new opportunities. It's interesting that some of the real "unicorns" of the last few decades have had founders/leaders with strong technical chops - your Gates and Zuckerbergs. They might not have been the best in their field, but they had that relatively rare combo of technical ability and business sense.
ibejoeb 6y ago
>Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's Curious about what more contemporary stuff you've experimented with vs. what you're comfortable with. The pop cycle is real. For instance, one of yesterday's top posts was about htmx, which is cool enough, but it's one of those things that's very opinionated about bundling content, presentation, and behavior, and which advocates for hypertext over consumer-neutral serialization formats. All of that was de rigueur not so long ago, and then heresy in the '00s. Yet, it works, and you can drop in it and get it working in like 2 minutes. I feel the same way as I suppose you do about a lot of popular toolchains for web work. Babel and webpack are beasts and definitely do remind me of some of the performance art-level stuff with autoconf and make. I work on some of this stuff in my spare time. Always happy to hear anecdotes.
karatestomp 6y ago
I’ve seen an actively-developed b2b product written in PHP as recently as two years ago, among the leaders in its niche. Fairly boring HTML with a light dusting of JS. Know what? It was refreshingly responsive and snappy and didn’t do any weird shit. Felt like, if not the 90s, the early 2000s.
thdrdt 6y ago
As someone who also started in the 90's I think I understand what you mean. It used to be: write HTML -> upload via FTP -> done. Therefore I think you should start with PHP. Write PHP -> upload -> done. If PHP is unpopular advice, maybe this is even more unpopular: you might want to check out the ProcessWire CMS. Yes, this is a CMS, but since the front-end and back-end are separated it can be used as framework for a lot of things. It has a lot of (free) addons, like support for Twig, making developing even complex systems very simple. And ofcourse you can use frameworks like Symfony and Laravel. But to get rid of the rocket science I believe PHP is the way to go because it makes deployments so much easier. And if the time comes your product is a success you can always hire rocket scientists who can help you to move on.
- XCSme 6y ago
  PHP is great :)
sho 6y ago
> Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's Nonsense! I've been around since the 90s too and let me tell you - you don't need any of the trendy new crap to make a successful app. You don't need a single page JS app except in very specific circumstances. You don't need microservices or serverless or map/reduce or Cassandra or NoSQL or nodejs or ML or any of it. Ignore all that noise, go pick up "Agile Web Development with Rails 6" and just do it. Haters gonna hate but if it's good enough for github it's very probably good enough for you.
ehnto 6y ago
You can still build it with whatever you want to. User's don't care if you used React through a GraphQL API talking to Microservices that sits on an instantly scaleable AWS infrastructure. These are technologies designed to solve problems that Really Big Companies have, and that most of us bootstrapping a SaaS do not. Don't be worried about "Scale" either, seriously. VC funded unicorns care about scale because they have million dollar budgets going into advertising, the reality for most bootstrapped SaaS and even mid-sized businesses is that a simple dedicated host is going to serve you well. Depends on the type of business I suppose, but if you need quick bursting scale then you'll probably know it. The bleeding edge is a mess. You want to pick only the things you absolutely need from it, and if you can't figure out what it is you need, you don't need anything but what you've got and life is good. Many of these technologies come at a cost to overall complexity, and for big companies they will have enough developers to specialize in all the different technologies going on. When I'm working with clients we can often use some new fangled technologies to help in really specific areas. But the vast, vast, vast majority of clients just need you to send their user a gosh darn web page and process some forms. Render your template, cache the thing and send it over. Instant low latency web experience, hoo-ray we're all happy.
tbran 6y ago
Check out BannerBear [0]. Made with Ruby on Rails by this guy [1]. Pieter Levels uses jquery and a single large php file for NomadList [2]. I think there's a pretty solid group of people using "old" tech to build modern interfaces. A lot of justification for things like React is around project management for teams. For an indie developer, there are simpler things like Unpoly, Stimulus/Turbolinks, jQuery, AlpineJS, and Intercooler/HTMX. Give it a shot! [0] https://www.bannerbear.com/ https://www.bannerbear.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/yongfook https://twitter.com/yongfook [2] https://nomadlist.com/ https://nomadlist.com/

stets 6y ago

Get after it! It's not too late and you don't need the latest *js to make something valuable. The effort can be worth it!

rodolphoarruda 6y ago
Vue.js was part of the architecture -- no kidding! But hey, thanks for the encouragement.
- stets 6y ago
  Fuck vue.js. Launch your thing. EarlyBrd only used jinja2 templates with Flask. Now I'm migrating to laravel and only use Blade templates. Prove your thing out first because most users don't really care unless you're making some kind of real-time data analytics bs (in which case inqtel or other prob wants to send you some money)
  - pembrook 6y ago
    What did you find were the downsides of developing a product in Flask vs. Laravel? Curious as I've been debating about which direction to steer a friend who is a designer trying their build their own product. He's played around with python, and liked it, so I was going to suggest flask (since most of online tutorials start there). But I've also heard good things about PHP/Laravel for beginners.
    - stets 6y ago
      I would recommend Laravel or even Rails for a beginner over Flask. Again, with Flask I was re-writing and implementing things I didn't need to. Like hashing passwords. Or building user scaffolding. Flask fans will argue that you can do all of these. Yes...but you probably are grabbing some module and reading the docs and then messing around with it for a while. My forgotten email system in flask was a celery task running in a sidecar container and using an additional redis container for queueing and grabbing that job. In laravel that looks more like one command. `php artisan ui vue --auth`. Maybe there is a better way but I found myself struggling for a lot. Yes I didn't need to use psycopg2 and make nasty raw SQL calls because SQLAlchemy exists. SQLAlchemy isn't built in though. Django has a lot of these features and much of flask's attractiveness is in being light-weight so I guess it makes sense. Today, I'd say for solo-founders, try out Laravel > Rails > Django > Flask > everything else
  - nonines 6y ago
    Great work. I'm curious though. Why Flask and not Django? Seems like you wanted a heavyweight after all.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  You could almost still run PHP scripts from those days. The same basic architecture works you just gotta study the new DB access methods that use prepared statements instead of string concatenation/interpolation. If you used Perl, mod_perl exists and CGI.pm is available in CPAN. The CGI protocol is as viable as it ever was (though of course there are new and improved alternatives). There are a bunch of minimal stylesheets out there that get you some mobile compatibility, and no IE 6/early Firefox nightmares, so your code can actually be simpler than ever.
  - stets 6y ago
    Someone should make a contest to revive older tech like perl and make a profitable product from it. Use the oldest tech and see who can make the most valuable product
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      FYI: Perl has one of the most powerful and modern web frameworks, Mojolicious, and one of the best web form libraries, called CGI::FormBuilder. Besides that, Perl allows forward references and has moderately strong type checking. And mod_perl is the best-performing language accelerator. I cringe whenever I have to downgrade to Python.
      - robertlagrant 6y ago
        I cringe whenever I have to use a language accelerator.

anderspitman 6y ago

HTML from the 90s will still run on today's browsers. Just because everyone is overcomplicating things doesn't mean you have to. If you have a great product it doesn't matter much what you use to build it.

sethammons 6y ago

to echo sibling comments: build your thing with 90's era frontend tech. A fancy UI is unlikely to be your differentiating feature. As long as it does its job, you can fix it later if it becomes successful -- hire a js expert at that point and re-do the frontend.

hckr_news 6y ago

Hey, this isn't true at all. Reading up documentation/resources, watching youtube tutorials, and even sometimes banging your head against the wall is a normal part of the software development process. Don't let the frustrations get to you. You mentioned the 90s but boy were people jerks back then (from the horror stories I read). I think today is probably the best time to be working on software with so many open source tools in addition to collaborative and helpful people you'll come across. As far as tooling goes, just keep a simple. Aim for a simple MVP. DB? Go mysql. Frontend? Choose a templating engine like EJS and css. Backend? Node/Express ecosystem would be my go to. Push it to Github. Host it on Netlify. There are some fantastic tutorials around the net to get this far. Everything else like monitoring tools, security, testing, containers are secondary to the initial MVP you can build.

stets 6y ago
This is good advice. Tech doesn't really matter. Yes, things will suck. But don't introduce complexity until you're absolutely sure it needs to be or that it will help you save time later on.
- danjac 6y ago
  I've worked/consulted at quite a few places where the code quality ranged from mediocre to abysmal. These companies were launched pretty much by people with an "X for Idiots" book on their lap or who hired their teenage nephew/best mate from college to do the coding. And yet, these companies did quite well, became quite successful and profitable businesses in their niche - and when they did hit the hard limits of technical debt, they had the money to hire professionals. Unfortunately there are limits to what professionals can do with just-about-working spaghetti code and bizarre database schemas, when you can't just throw away and rewrite software that's powering a growing business that needs more new features than it needs a cleaner codebase, but nonetheless they got much further than many SaaS companies started by developers with well thought out architecture, beautiful code and the latest tech stack. The reason they were successful is that the founders lived and breathed their niche and understood the problems and their customers. They saw opportunities as well as risks and blind alleys. The tech was just a means to that end, not the end in of itself. That said, before people say "the tech doesn't matter", I think that had they the technical skills to match their domain knowledge and connections, they would have been far more successful and would not have hit those hard limits that slowed them down and perhaps prevented them from expanding further and seizing on new opportunities. It's interesting that some of the real "unicorns" of the last few decades have had founders/leaders with strong technical chops - your Gates and Zuckerbergs. They might not have been the best in their field, but they had that relatively rare combo of technical ability and business sense.

ibejoeb 6y ago

>Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's Curious about what more contemporary stuff you've experimented with vs. what you're comfortable with. The pop cycle is real. For instance, one of yesterday's top posts was about htmx, which is cool enough, but it's one of those things that's very opinionated about bundling content, presentation, and behavior, and which advocates for hypertext over consumer-neutral serialization formats. All of that was de rigueur not so long ago, and then heresy in the '00s. Yet, it works, and you can drop in it and get it working in like 2 minutes. I feel the same way as I suppose you do about a lot of popular toolchains for web work. Babel and webpack are beasts and definitely do remind me of some of the performance art-level stuff with autoconf and make. I work on some of this stuff in my spare time. Always happy to hear anecdotes.

karatestomp 6y ago

I’ve seen an actively-developed b2b product written in PHP as recently as two years ago, among the leaders in its niche. Fairly boring HTML with a light dusting of JS. Know what? It was refreshingly responsive and snappy and didn’t do any weird shit. Felt like, if not the 90s, the early 2000s.

thdrdt 6y ago

As someone who also started in the 90's I think I understand what you mean. It used to be: write HTML -> upload via FTP -> done. Therefore I think you should start with PHP. Write PHP -> upload -> done. If PHP is unpopular advice, maybe this is even more unpopular: you might want to check out the ProcessWire CMS. Yes, this is a CMS, but since the front-end and back-end are separated it can be used as framework for a lot of things. It has a lot of (free) addons, like support for Twig, making developing even complex systems very simple. And ofcourse you can use frameworks like Symfony and Laravel. But to get rid of the rocket science I believe PHP is the way to go because it makes deployments so much easier. And if the time comes your product is a success you can always hire rocket scientists who can help you to move on.

XCSme 6y ago
PHP is great :)

sho 6y ago

> Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's Nonsense! I've been around since the 90s too and let me tell you - you don't need any of the trendy new crap to make a successful app. You don't need a single page JS app except in very specific circumstances. You don't need microservices or serverless or map/reduce or Cassandra or NoSQL or nodejs or ML or any of it. Ignore all that noise, go pick up "Agile Web Development with Rails 6" and just do it. Haters gonna hate but if it's good enough for github it's very probably good enough for you.

ehnto 6y ago

You can still build it with whatever you want to. User's don't care if you used React through a GraphQL API talking to Microservices that sits on an instantly scaleable AWS infrastructure. These are technologies designed to solve problems that Really Big Companies have, and that most of us bootstrapping a SaaS do not. Don't be worried about "Scale" either, seriously. VC funded unicorns care about scale because they have million dollar budgets going into advertising, the reality for most bootstrapped SaaS and even mid-sized businesses is that a simple dedicated host is going to serve you well. Depends on the type of business I suppose, but if you need quick bursting scale then you'll probably know it. The bleeding edge is a mess. You want to pick only the things you absolutely need from it, and if you can't figure out what it is you need, you don't need anything but what you've got and life is good. Many of these technologies come at a cost to overall complexity, and for big companies they will have enough developers to specialize in all the different technologies going on. When I'm working with clients we can often use some new fangled technologies to help in really specific areas. But the vast, vast, vast majority of clients just need you to send their user a gosh darn web page and process some forms. Render your template, cache the thing and send it over. Instant low latency web experience, hoo-ray we're all happy.

tbran 6y ago

Check out BannerBear [0]. Made with Ruby on Rails by this guy [1]. Pieter Levels uses jquery and a single large php file for NomadList [2]. I think there's a pretty solid group of people using "old" tech to build modern interfaces. A lot of justification for things like React is around project management for teams. For an indie developer, there are simpler things like Unpoly, Stimulus/Turbolinks, jQuery, AlpineJS, and Intercooler/HTMX. Give it a shot! [0] https://www.bannerbear.com/ https://www.bannerbear.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/yongfook https://twitter.com/yongfook [2] https://nomadlist.com/ https://nomadlist.com/