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I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the co

I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me. Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world. Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it? > If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down. Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money. Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.

runawaybottle 6y ago
I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding. If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones. Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too. They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.
- LordOfWolves 6y ago
  Will we not need some sort of interface for the ordinary user to perform perhaps unordinary action on said data (the same data that’s in airtable)? The command line can be daunting until you play with it a bit and I know many web devs try to avoid it as much as possible while working.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Air tables is a sign of this gs to come but we are not there yet. Our head of sales wants to use an air tables like product but upper management will not yield, we need a real CMS. I think this sort of thinking will delay the adoption of such tools.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    Yeah, not just devs, but armies of designers, product people, managers all distinguish themselves with minute product differentiation, a large majority of the industry runs on _not_ standardizing data and UI. There's more inertia here than just whenever the accountants notice the cost difference. You'll see people retry outsourcing before you see standardization if I'm understanding this conversation correctly
- aliswe 6y ago
  Wordpress

runawaybottle 6y ago

I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding. If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones. Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too. They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.

LordOfWolves 6y ago
Will we not need some sort of interface for the ordinary user to perform perhaps unordinary action on said data (the same data that’s in airtable)? The command line can be daunting until you play with it a bit and I know many web devs try to avoid it as much as possible while working.
xupybd 6y ago
Air tables is a sign of this gs to come but we are not there yet. Our head of sales wants to use an air tables like product but upper management will not yield, we need a real CMS. I think this sort of thinking will delay the adoption of such tools.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  Yeah, not just devs, but armies of designers, product people, managers all distinguish themselves with minute product differentiation, a large majority of the industry runs on _not_ standardizing data and UI. There's more inertia here than just whenever the accountants notice the cost difference. You'll see people retry outsourcing before you see standardization if I'm understanding this conversation correctly
aliswe 6y ago
Wordpress