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This is my experience, and your mileage may vary: Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing. Early on, I worked on a
by recursivedoubts 6y ago
This is my experience, and your mileage may vary:
Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing.
Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu (https://gosu-lang.github.io/ https://gosu-lang.github.io/) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while (over half a decade.)
A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned a jQuery function I was noodling on into intercooler.js (https://intercoolerjs.org/ https://intercoolerjs.org/). After a year of that I returned to mundane web programming for quite a while (over half a decade.)
Unexpectedly, a year ago, the country shut down. I was at home and decided to see if I could remove the jQuery dependency in intercooler.js, and so created htmx (https://htmx.org/ https://htmx.org/).
When creating htmx and removing some attribute/functionality that was in intercooler.js, I realized that a small programming language would be the ideal replacement, so I created hyperscript (https://hyperscript.org/ https://hyperscript.org/) I had not expected to work on a programming language again, but now I am.
So my career has been some very exciting technical projects punctuating long stretches of pretty basic, boring web development, where the most exciting thing is me wondering if I can figure out what the deuce is wrong with my CSS.
My takeaway, at least in my career, is that patience is a virtue, and the interesting stuff tends to come up at irregular intervals and in unexpected moments and ways.
- tarruda 6y agoWhen you are working on "mundane web programming", are you employed or just freelancing? If you are employed, do you quit your job to work on these more exciting projects?
- recursivedoubts 6y agoI have been in both situations over the last two decades. I don't quit to work on these projects, I usually work on them sporadically during work hours or, during intense periods that rarely last more than a week or two early on, full time. htmx was done during the first few weeks of the covid shutdown, for example.
- michalf6 6y agohtmx looks really neat, I think I'll be using it for some quick and dirty prototyping.
- sibeliuss 6y agothe underscore is silent -- love it
- Lapsa 6y agocan't tell if this is an ad from the get go or not
- tubularhells 6y agoYeah, it's a webdev posturing on how he reinvented the wheel three times in a decade. Look at the code he linked, and weep.
- brysonreece 6y agoOr consider it a viable solution to the itch OP was trying to scratch with their own development. It's easy to brush aside a monumental amount of effort and thought that gets poured into projects like these, marking them internally as fruitless, when 1) we're not the ones that spent the long nights and weekends obsessing over the nuances of the specific problem OP was trying to solve. 2) any of us on HN are usually here shit posting because we're avoiding putting in the same effort for our own projects.
- recursivedoubts 6y agothat's true to an extent (it was nearly two decades :) and adds to my answer for the parent question: there has been a lot of mockery along the way during the interesting parts, as well as depression when things I was very passionate about (e.g. gosu) were ignored or failed hyperscript will most likely meet a similar fate that's life
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoI like the stuff he made. I find using htmx much more pleasant than react type programming.
- kaeruct 6y agoFor a moment I was very confused since I remembered hyperscript being this and existing for a longer time: https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript Hopefully you are already aware of the name clash. I am definitely interested in your hypescript more than the old one but the name clash is unfortunate.