3 ms·

I'm a greybeard. I've been doing this since before HTML existed, and I've kept up with the changes as they occurred along the way. I'm not going to refute the

I'm a greybeard. I've been doing this since before HTML existed, and I've kept up with the changes as they occurred along the way. I'm not going to refute the author's points one by one. Everything being complained about exists for a reason. I agree that it's incredibly complex. It's overwhelming. That's why people specialize. An individual can still own an entire application and infrastructure, limit their technology choices to those from the 90s, and produce a perfectly functional, modern web application indistinguishable from anything using the latest tools and frameworks. It's a whole lot of work, though. If you take the time to learn some of the modern tools, they'll save you a lot of time. Why re-invent the wheel? But all these time-saving frameworks are complex, and learning all of them would take years, if you haven't been keeping up as they evolved. You can learn one or two of them quickly, though. You can specialize. That's why we have DevOps teams, UI teams, API teams, database teams. That's a lot of people. But that's what it takes if you want a high-performance web application that can scale to support hundreds of millions of users, is responsive around the world, supports a variety of languages, can handle disruptions, complies with regulations, and on and on. Don't need those things? Then stick with PHP and HTML on a server you run yourself. This isn't the 90s anymore. There are a lot of people out there, and if you're building something worth using, it's a different ballgame.

dexwiz 5y ago
I agree with your argument. The comment about blogs taking long to load leads me to believe most of these complaints are really only applicable to small scale projects. The massive stacks used for web development now are targeted at organizations that can scale into the hundreds or thousands of web developers with varying skills. In turn, when doing small scale work, most newer developers copy the massive enterprise stack, pay the price for the possibility of scaling (both requestwise and developerwise) without every really needing to.
- orev 5y ago
  There are far more small projects in the world than ones that need to scale to be huge, while at the same time every developer working on a small project is trying to build their resume so they can one day work on one of those big ones. So that leads the every small project using these huge stacks for no technical reason, and bogging all those users down.
ninjaa 5y ago
And then there's one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR with a web app and react-native apps for iOS and Android from a Next.js monorepo all by his lonesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnbdRweJtA&t=432s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnbdRweJtA&t=432s I really think the React-Native and Next.JS (and tRPC and Prisma and GQL) have hit a PHP-style tipping point where we are going to see a great new flowering of cross platform web and mobile apps (last seen in the Facebook / Wikipedia era 2007-2014 era and driven by MySQL + PHP + jQuery + Phonegap). I feel excited, the hype is finally real. So yeah sometimes that mixed abstractions complexity works against you, I feel like every decade or so it converges into a stack you can really use to effectively GTD.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  The key here is that for his business problem, the technology used is completely irrelevant.
- theon144 5y ago
  >one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR [...] all by his lonesome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
dennis_jeeves 5y ago

dexwiz 5y ago

I agree with your argument. The comment about blogs taking long to load leads me to believe most of these complaints are really only applicable to small scale projects. The massive stacks used for web development now are targeted at organizations that can scale into the hundreds or thousands of web developers with varying skills. In turn, when doing small scale work, most newer developers copy the massive enterprise stack, pay the price for the possibility of scaling (both requestwise and developerwise) without every really needing to.

orev 5y ago
There are far more small projects in the world than ones that need to scale to be huge, while at the same time every developer working on a small project is trying to build their resume so they can one day work on one of those big ones. So that leads the every small project using these huge stacks for no technical reason, and bogging all those users down.

ninjaa 5y ago

And then there's one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR with a web app and react-native apps for iOS and Android from a Next.js monorepo all by his lonesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnbdRweJtA&t=432s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnbdRweJtA&t=432s I really think the React-Native and Next.JS (and tRPC and Prisma and GQL) have hit a PHP-style tipping point where we are going to see a great new flowering of cross platform web and mobile apps (last seen in the Facebook / Wikipedia era 2007-2014 era and driven by MySQL + PHP + jQuery + Phonegap). I feel excited, the hype is finally real. So yeah sometimes that mixed abstractions complexity works against you, I feel like every decade or so it converges into a stack you can really use to effectively GTD.

fxtentacle 5y ago
The key here is that for his business problem, the technology used is completely irrelevant.
theon144 5y ago
>one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR [...] all by his lonesome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

dennis_jeeves 5y ago