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Look, I can sometimes be pretty quick to bemoan the state of modern web dev. I don't do it enough these days to be able to keep up with the current trend. So on

Look, I can sometimes be pretty quick to bemoan the state of modern web dev. I don't do it enough these days to be able to keep up with the current trend. So once or twice a year when I get the itch I inevitably spend more time than I should screaming about having to learn React's latest way to do some new thing, or that everyone has switched from npm to yarn and back again, or... there's always something. Lots of somethings. The discourse on HN whenever this topic comes up is tiresome though and not at all to the level you'd expect on most topics from this audience. It's the unfiltered dumping of that emotional reaction I outlined above. You know what? You can still build things the old way! Nobody has taken that away. It still works exactly as you'd expect. Do a bunch of HTML, lay it all out using tables, do inline styling. Host it on an Apache server. It'll be fine. To think these were the glory days of dev though just washes away the fact that it was "good enough" for the subset of people that were lucky enough to have access to the internet back then. who were probably only a hop or two away from an academic backbone that was servicing them. Who, if you were in a relatively remote part of the planet like myself, would likely have a caching proxy server in there to improve the performance because most universities being able to cache the content of a huge part of the internet was a totally feasible undertaking back then. But now half the planet is connected. With huge variance in the speed and latency on which they connect, huge variance in the types of devices they're using, incredibly distributed relative to where the content is served, and with entirely new expectations for the type of content they want and the way they expect to interact with it. Sure, modern dev has lots of room for a simpler devex. Read through the OP though and you'll see it's because there has been a shift to prioritize the experience of the end users above that of the developers. That's what those list of features are for. You're still free to ignore it and build stuff the old way, just accept whose needs you're putting first in the process.

Zandikar 4y ago
> there has been a shift to prioritize the experience of the end users I was mostly on the same page with you till I got to this phrase. My immediate reaction to this was laughing in disbelief. The internet has never been more outright hostile to end users than it is today, even when the underlying intent is morally good (Would you like some cookies?). Devex and the web in general (back end, front end, user experience, etc) is very different than it was. It's better in many ways. It's worse in many ways too. To assert that we've "sacrificed" devex for the sake of the end user is laughable though.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Both can be true at once. Huge corporations can be exploiting people for their data even while they develop new techniques to make their web applications more appealing and useful. Cookie banners can plague every website and those same websites can be more intuitive to use than ever before. I would say that the shift has been not just toward prioritizing end users but also towards prioritizing profits. The point is that developer experience is much lower down on the priorities list than it was, because we're now paid enough money that we'll suck it up and do what the business needs rather than doing the thing that's easiest for us.
  - Zandikar 4y ago
    > Both can be true at once. Which is why I asserted both statements to be true side by side. It was in fact the entire point of my comment. Things are worse overall for the end user as a result of both divergent experiences being simultaneously true.

Zandikar 4y ago

> there has been a shift to prioritize the experience of the end users I was mostly on the same page with you till I got to this phrase. My immediate reaction to this was laughing in disbelief. The internet has never been more outright hostile to end users than it is today, even when the underlying intent is morally good (Would you like some cookies?). Devex and the web in general (back end, front end, user experience, etc) is very different than it was. It's better in many ways. It's worse in many ways too. To assert that we've "sacrificed" devex for the sake of the end user is laughable though.

lolinder 4y ago
Both can be true at once. Huge corporations can be exploiting people for their data even while they develop new techniques to make their web applications more appealing and useful. Cookie banners can plague every website and those same websites can be more intuitive to use than ever before. I would say that the shift has been not just toward prioritizing end users but also towards prioritizing profits. The point is that developer experience is much lower down on the priorities list than it was, because we're now paid enough money that we'll suck it up and do what the business needs rather than doing the thing that's easiest for us.
- Zandikar 4y ago
  > Both can be true at once. Which is why I asserted both statements to be true side by side. It was in fact the entire point of my comment. Things are worse overall for the end user as a result of both divergent experiences being simultaneously true.