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> It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump. I'm n
by amacneil 5y ago
> It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump.
I'm not convinced that is true. At least if you compare 2012 with 2022, it was very easy to get a Rails app working, with user authentication/signup/password reset/etc (Devise), integrate Stripe for payments, deploy the whole thing on Heroku. It wasn't an overnight project, but one person could get that done in a few weeks of full time work. There was a lot of energy and excitement around this stack and the community often created "one good way" of doing things.
In 2022, all those technologies are still available, but they are uncool and most of the internet will dissuade you from using them. Instead, unopinionated micro-frameworks are in vogue, and you you're down a rabbit hole creating the same product by gluing together dozens of libraries, writing a jamstack SPA, deploying the whole thing on kubernetes. You could easily spend several weeks just building out user signup flows, password reset, email templates, etc.
I'm not saying it's all bad today: you can do much more with a SPA than you ever could with server side HTML + jquery, and back in the day when you hit a wall with Rails it was often extremely difficult to work around, whereas today's libraries are much more flexible. But for the happy path of "scaffold a functioning SaaS app", I definitely feel like it's harder to get started today than 10 years ago.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago> At least if you compare 2012 with 2022, it was very easy to get a Rails app working, with user authentication/signup/password reset/etc (Devise), integrate Stripe for payments, deploy the whole thing on Heroku. It wasn't an overnight project, but one person could get that done in a few weeks of full time work. If you use Phoenix in 2022, you can generate authentication/signup/pasword reset/etc with a single command and the generator was written by the same person who created Devise back in 2010. You also get LiveView (and generators for it) that let you make apps with all the interactivity of a SPA. Oh, and there's a single line mix command to deploy a release of your app to fly.io! In short, things have become far easier for small teams and solo devs as long as they chose appropriate tools. Obviously it's going to be painful if you try to go it alone with the exact same tools a team of 30 or more would use. The same was just as true a decade ago.
- amacneil 5y agoI haven’t tried Phoenix, but I believe you. I guess my point is more that the “general internet consensus” in 2022 doesn’t make life easy for you. It might be possible to do all this easily in Phoenix, but most people starting out are going to get directed down the npm/js/nextjs/express/etc DIY route, which is probably not the easiest path to market.
- pier25 5y agoThe issue with LiveView and similar solutions like HotWire is latency. That's why Hey is impossible to use from places like NZ.