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You should come join the fun! In order to deploy a web app in 2020, one must write his frontend using react and typescript that would transpile the code into a

You should come join the fun! In order to deploy a web app in 2020, one must write his frontend using react and typescript that would transpile the code into a nicely bundled and minified javascript and css files along with thousands of your 3rd party dependency libs. Yes, you heard that right! I just counted the number of libs on the node_modules in one of my small side project and it's over 1000s. You might also wonder why the typescript code would produce css when transpiled. That's because in 2020 we no longer write stylesheet directly into a css file. That's so 90s! We write the css as javascript objects now, then let the transpiler generate css from that. Isn't that neat?! For the backend, you can choose one of the many cool frameworks and languages. Heck, why not use 5? In 2020 the backend should be written as a collection of microservices that talk to each other over grpc. Of course you still need http or how else would your react frontend talk to your microservices? So your microservices now talks multiple protocols, which is very cool! Now pack each of those service into a collection of docker images, then write 4000 lines of yaml files to orchestrate them on kubernetes, and you're ready to go! Now you have a glorious, scalable app with 99.999% sla that can withstand your show hn frontpage traffic thanks to kubernetes, until you eventually screw up that yaml config and the whole house of cards collapse, but that's on you because you're bad at kubernetes orchestration! I think we're indeed in a deep trench but damn it's quite an impressive trench we got here!

chris_wot 6y ago
I'm genuinely curious - do you really have to do all of that? Why not just ignore the frameworks and technologies that overcomplicate things and use what works best for you? I am wondering why someone just hasn't forked etcd if it is truly so awful now.
- incompatible 6y ago
  Forking is the answer, if you don't like the where a particular group is going with an open source project. Fork an old version, and perhaps you will find some others who prefer it that way.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Nope! The original group will sue you for trademark infringement, despite that they're the ones peddling a broken knockoff version. (See, eg Python, Firefox, GIMP, etc; I don't pay much attention to webapp-related stuff, so I don't have more proximate examples.)
    - incompatible 6y ago
      So just give it a new name.
  - chillfox 6y ago
    yes, but that generally doesn't stop someone from feeling annoyed. While I do like cheering for annoyed people to fork projects it's not always practical for a number of reason like: - The project is large and really requires multiple people to maintain. - It's written in a programming language that the person is not familiar with, or interested in (they might even dislike it). - License issues. - Their work might prevent them from working on open source projects due to intellectual property concerns.
- bfb09 6y ago
  Yes. If you don’t, and scp a Perl script to run under supervisord that meets the business requirement in three days instead of three months of microservices strategy, you are accused of being so hopelessly junior that you are unemployable. I have witnessed that firsthand. Despite the anecdote being backend, I’d bet my 401(k) it’s the same up front.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Unfortunately yes. I'm a freelancer so I have to keep up with the latest tech, at least just enough so I can debug issues when working on my clients' projects. You probably don't need to do this on your niche and can just keep using whatever stuff that works for you.
- coopierez 6y ago
  Being a complete newbie on the scene a few years ago, the choice of frameworks and tools was so incredibly overwhelming (coming from C/C++ land). There are strong opinion pieces both for and against basically everything too. When you are still trying to figure out exactly what HTML and JS should be responsible for, having React, Vue, PHP, Elm and many more as options for "just making a simple web page" can slow down the learning process by an order of magnitude. I'm not sure what the solution is here- clearly each of these tools has a niche which requires them, but making a basic webapp without a web-engineering degree is quickly becoming an impossibility.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
And here I am, making a career writing LOB web apps in Rails, and getting to MVP in weeks instead of months (or even years). Guess I'm really missing the boat!
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  My pet theory is developers crave challenges. If their project is not challenging enough to stimulate their mind, they will introduce more and more complexities until the project is hard enough to keep them intellectually stimulated. Thus, software development will never converge into a single tech stack as smart developers that got bored as hell working on crud apps will invent new stuff to make their work more interesting and meaningful. In 5 years react and kubernetes will be considered legacy tech and we will march on to other new shiny tech.
Nextgrid 6y ago
> Of course you still need http or how else would your react frontend talk to your microservices? Don't forget GraphQL on top of that, otherwise you're not really in 2020.

chris_wot 6y ago

I'm genuinely curious - do you really have to do all of that? Why not just ignore the frameworks and technologies that overcomplicate things and use what works best for you? I am wondering why someone just hasn't forked etcd if it is truly so awful now.

incompatible 6y ago
Forking is the answer, if you don't like the where a particular group is going with an open source project. Fork an old version, and perhaps you will find some others who prefer it that way.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  Nope! The original group will sue you for trademark infringement, despite that they're the ones peddling a broken knockoff version. (See, eg Python, Firefox, GIMP, etc; I don't pay much attention to webapp-related stuff, so I don't have more proximate examples.)
  - incompatible 6y ago
    So just give it a new name.
- chillfox 6y ago
  yes, but that generally doesn't stop someone from feeling annoyed. While I do like cheering for annoyed people to fork projects it's not always practical for a number of reason like: - The project is large and really requires multiple people to maintain. - It's written in a programming language that the person is not familiar with, or interested in (they might even dislike it). - License issues. - Their work might prevent them from working on open source projects due to intellectual property concerns.
bfb09 6y ago
Yes. If you don’t, and scp a Perl script to run under supervisord that meets the business requirement in three days instead of three months of microservices strategy, you are accused of being so hopelessly junior that you are unemployable. I have witnessed that firsthand. Despite the anecdote being backend, I’d bet my 401(k) it’s the same up front.
neurostimulant 6y ago
Unfortunately yes. I'm a freelancer so I have to keep up with the latest tech, at least just enough so I can debug issues when working on my clients' projects. You probably don't need to do this on your niche and can just keep using whatever stuff that works for you.
coopierez 6y ago
Being a complete newbie on the scene a few years ago, the choice of frameworks and tools was so incredibly overwhelming (coming from C/C++ land). There are strong opinion pieces both for and against basically everything too. When you are still trying to figure out exactly what HTML and JS should be responsible for, having React, Vue, PHP, Elm and many more as options for "just making a simple web page" can slow down the learning process by an order of magnitude. I'm not sure what the solution is here- clearly each of these tools has a niche which requires them, but making a basic webapp without a web-engineering degree is quickly becoming an impossibility.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

And here I am, making a career writing LOB web apps in Rails, and getting to MVP in weeks instead of months (or even years). Guess I'm really missing the boat!

neurostimulant 6y ago
My pet theory is developers crave challenges. If their project is not challenging enough to stimulate their mind, they will introduce more and more complexities until the project is hard enough to keep them intellectually stimulated. Thus, software development will never converge into a single tech stack as smart developers that got bored as hell working on crud apps will invent new stuff to make their work more interesting and meaningful. In 5 years react and kubernetes will be considered legacy tech and we will march on to other new shiny tech.

Nextgrid 6y ago

> Of course you still need http or how else would your react frontend talk to your microservices? Don't forget GraphQL on top of that, otherwise you're not really in 2020.