7 ms·

I miss the "immediate web". Being able to work on simple things without feeling like they are useless, pointless or perceptibly outdated. Now it's install node

I miss the "immediate web". Being able to work on simple things without feeling like they are useless, pointless or perceptibly outdated. Now it's install node, install git, install npm, install a gazillion packages, run localhost then hope everything works. Build command, clean command, eject commands, deploy command, pre processors, post processers, documentations full of so much jargon that i feel burnt out looking at it, hydration rehydration, pre-rendering, headless cms....on and on. I find myself reverting to writing simple bash scripts, userscripts - they are more enduring, not built on a stack of fickle dependencies, fads and ever increasing complexity.

rtpg 4y ago
You can choose not to use most of that stuff. I recently moved some stuff over to esbuild and that's been pretty helpful for that. Jest is a big and heavy thing but I've found it's the test framework that gives the least headaches without really needing to be configured. And of course deploying can be a one-line "run esbuild with the output going here". Or even check in the artifacts! You lose the nice stuff like livereload but you can hack in something to that effect if you want to.
blauditore 4y ago
If you build web pages without the whole JS frameworks and Node circus, they are pretty durable. Those helpers were invented because people started to build empires (complex applications) on sand (the web), so they are pretty useful for larger projects, but simple websites can still be easily built with plain HTML/CSS/JS.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  yeah but there is no value, personally in building projects like that anymore, you can not use them in your portfolio or to progress your career - i was going to build a personal site, but realised it would probably act as more of a hindrance to me, because potential clients/employers would see that it was not using latest new js fad. if it was up to me i would never touch those things, but that's what the market has become. i even resisted learning typescript for so many years, because i loathe the idea of learning a language that needs to be converted to have correct syntax. same with jsx, i use it, but it feels horrible.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    If the only reason you build websites is to get paid then you're part of the problem. Separate your personal and professional lives. Or do you not enjoy building on the web for fun?
    - Ntrails 4y ago
      > If the only reason you build websites is to get paid then you're part of the problem. This is absurd. I write code for a living, I enjoy solving problems and that is part of my job. I do not write code in my free time. I play video games, go hiking or go to the beach and maybe read a book with dragons in. That doesn't make me a problem. My job is not my life. Honestly it shouldn't be, it is not healthy imo
      - deadbeeves 4y ago
        You can code in your free time without your job being your life, as you put it. For example, your hobby project might have nothing to do with your day job and just be something you want to make or that gives you pleasure to tinker with. If you don't really enjoy doing it of if there are other things you'd rather do then you don't have to do it, obviously, but this idea that you can either never code outside work hours or have an unhealthy relationship with your job is a false dichotomy.
      - andai 4y ago
        You're competing against people who do. "Should" it be that way? It's not the employer's fault some prefer to spend their free time programming too ;)
    - 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
      i've been doing this since 2007 as a full-time career. I think my interest peaked around the ajax/jquery era and has been in steady decline ever since. i'm just bitter about becoming a web dinosaur.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    You think potential clients are digging in to the source code of your hypothetical personal website? You sound like you've identified a group of technologies as a personal enemy, and already don't use or want to use them. The most value you can deliver to a potential client when they visit your website, is in communicating concisely what you have and are capable of buiding for other people like them, not what you're capable of building for yourself as a vanity project
andyp-kw 4y ago
For frontend stuff, moving away from the JavaScript ecosystem to C# with blazor has really improved my motivation.
- cutler 4y ago
  At the expense of unrealistic download size.
tlarkworthy 4y ago
This was why I created https://webcode.run https://webcode.run the elimination of all tooling and a fast development loop even for backend
tiborsaas 4y ago
You can still drag and drop a folder to the Netlify UI and it's published immediately. How you produce the static assets is up to you. Of course, having to work with multiple devs on the same project adds lots of complexity to minimize risks and conflicts.
- drdec 4y ago
  > having to work with multiple devs on the same project adds lots of complexity to minimize risks and conflicts. That's when you link a GitHub repo to Netlify.
knighthack 4y ago
I remember the first time I heard the word "tree shaking" for CSS. ...I genuinely wondered what tree was involved. Took a Google search before I understood that it was industry jargon, which meant this: to reduce/minify code. There are many similarly opaque things in the world of web-development.
- splintercell 4y ago
  Tree shaking doesn’t mean to minify the code but remove the CSS classes from the payload which are not being used anywhere. Proper term is dead code elimination (DCE).
  - Jetrel 4y ago
    To help clarify for the person you're replying to; minification could be considered to only mean: taking an interpreted language like JS, and essentially compressing the text of the code by doing transformations to it that don't change the semantic meaning of the code. Swapping out long variable/function names with short, computer-generated single(ish)-letter names. Removing whitespace. Much of this was because real compression methods like zip simply weren't available during early decades of web development. Obviously, if shrinking the code size is desirable, and you were building a library that did minification, you'd want to move on to also adding other, more dangerous changes that could change the meaning of the code, like removing unused CSS classes, doing DCE on javascript, etc, etc. -- Since programming is a giant, decentralized soup of autodidacts, there's no "word of god" authority that can really say "this is the one true name of something". It's mostly just lingo that passes in and out of various communities, and a lot of times communities (as you're seeing in splintercell's comment) try to helpfully match themselves up and standardize so it doesn't degenerate into pure chaos.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Why is "dead code elimination" more proper than tree shaking? Is CSS even "code"?
    - TOGoS 4y ago
pjmlp 4y ago
The immediate is how I code in private Web projects to this day, at work is another matter. If I had a vote on the matter, it would still be fully SSR with a little bit of vanilaJS when need.
g105b 4y ago
I hate all that nonsense, so I don't use it.
wslh 4y ago
Don't forget containerization: instead of just downloading sources, build them and run you need to think all the time outside the core problem. I likte to think about the the term development UX in contrast of end-user/mass UXs.
beej71 4y ago
> not built on a stack of fickle dependencies, fads and ever increasing complexity. Every dependency is a benefit and a liability. It's been interesting to watch this ecosystem grow over the past decade as we collectively explore how much liability we're willing to accept.
tarsinge 4y ago
I got so tired repeating this and trying to convince others that just I created my own agency. Clients are happy, I’m happier, so I guess we are not totally crazy.
GuB-42 4y ago
The more I see the modern web, the more I appreciate PHP (LAMP stack or similar). On the client side, with IE6 more or less gone, most of it can be done with vanilla JS, no need for JQuery anymore. If what you are doing is just another CRUD-based website, there is real need for more, PHP is designed to make that simple. I had a well deserved reputation for poor security, but they got better, and 90% of it is addressed by just using parameterized SQL queries.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
coffeefirst 4y ago
I miss view-source. It used to be you could open up your dev tools and figure out how things were made. And you could learn all sorts of things about architecture and style and techniques this way. Now its all buried in build processes and obfuscation techniques, as if your button handler is a tightly kept secret that's somehow protected by scrambling your variable names. Although the other day I came across a complex app that was built in modern vanilla JS with native ES6 imports alongside regular old CSS. It was a work of art.

rtpg 4y ago

You can choose not to use most of that stuff. I recently moved some stuff over to esbuild and that's been pretty helpful for that. Jest is a big and heavy thing but I've found it's the test framework that gives the least headaches without really needing to be configured. And of course deploying can be a one-line "run esbuild with the output going here". Or even check in the artifacts! You lose the nice stuff like livereload but you can hack in something to that effect if you want to.

blauditore 4y ago

If you build web pages without the whole JS frameworks and Node circus, they are pretty durable. Those helpers were invented because people started to build empires (complex applications) on sand (the web), so they are pretty useful for larger projects, but simple websites can still be easily built with plain HTML/CSS/JS.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
yeah but there is no value, personally in building projects like that anymore, you can not use them in your portfolio or to progress your career - i was going to build a personal site, but realised it would probably act as more of a hindrance to me, because potential clients/employers would see that it was not using latest new js fad. if it was up to me i would never touch those things, but that's what the market has become. i even resisted learning typescript for so many years, because i loathe the idea of learning a language that needs to be converted to have correct syntax. same with jsx, i use it, but it feels horrible.
- superkuh 4y ago
  If the only reason you build websites is to get paid then you're part of the problem. Separate your personal and professional lives. Or do you not enjoy building on the web for fun?
  - Ntrails 4y ago
    > If the only reason you build websites is to get paid then you're part of the problem. This is absurd. I write code for a living, I enjoy solving problems and that is part of my job. I do not write code in my free time. I play video games, go hiking or go to the beach and maybe read a book with dragons in. That doesn't make me a problem. My job is not my life. Honestly it shouldn't be, it is not healthy imo
    - deadbeeves 4y ago
      You can code in your free time without your job being your life, as you put it. For example, your hobby project might have nothing to do with your day job and just be something you want to make or that gives you pleasure to tinker with. If you don't really enjoy doing it of if there are other things you'd rather do then you don't have to do it, obviously, but this idea that you can either never code outside work hours or have an unhealthy relationship with your job is a false dichotomy.
    - andai 4y ago
      You're competing against people who do. "Should" it be that way? It's not the employer's fault some prefer to spend their free time programming too ;)
  - 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
    i've been doing this since 2007 as a full-time career. I think my interest peaked around the ajax/jquery era and has been in steady decline ever since. i'm just bitter about becoming a web dinosaur.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  You think potential clients are digging in to the source code of your hypothetical personal website? You sound like you've identified a group of technologies as a personal enemy, and already don't use or want to use them. The most value you can deliver to a potential client when they visit your website, is in communicating concisely what you have and are capable of buiding for other people like them, not what you're capable of building for yourself as a vanity project

andyp-kw 4y ago

For frontend stuff, moving away from the JavaScript ecosystem to C# with blazor has really improved my motivation.

cutler 4y ago
At the expense of unrealistic download size.

tlarkworthy 4y ago

This was why I created https://webcode.run https://webcode.run the elimination of all tooling and a fast development loop even for backend

tiborsaas 4y ago

You can still drag and drop a folder to the Netlify UI and it's published immediately. How you produce the static assets is up to you. Of course, having to work with multiple devs on the same project adds lots of complexity to minimize risks and conflicts.

drdec 4y ago
> having to work with multiple devs on the same project adds lots of complexity to minimize risks and conflicts. That's when you link a GitHub repo to Netlify.

knighthack 4y ago

I remember the first time I heard the word "tree shaking" for CSS. ...I genuinely wondered what tree was involved. Took a Google search before I understood that it was industry jargon, which meant this: to reduce/minify code. There are many similarly opaque things in the world of web-development.

splintercell 4y ago
Tree shaking doesn’t mean to minify the code but remove the CSS classes from the payload which are not being used anywhere. Proper term is dead code elimination (DCE).
- Jetrel 4y ago
  To help clarify for the person you're replying to; minification could be considered to only mean: taking an interpreted language like JS, and essentially compressing the text of the code by doing transformations to it that don't change the semantic meaning of the code. Swapping out long variable/function names with short, computer-generated single(ish)-letter names. Removing whitespace. Much of this was because real compression methods like zip simply weren't available during early decades of web development. Obviously, if shrinking the code size is desirable, and you were building a library that did minification, you'd want to move on to also adding other, more dangerous changes that could change the meaning of the code, like removing unused CSS classes, doing DCE on javascript, etc, etc. -- Since programming is a giant, decentralized soup of autodidacts, there's no "word of god" authority that can really say "this is the one true name of something". It's mostly just lingo that passes in and out of various communities, and a lot of times communities (as you're seeing in splintercell's comment) try to helpfully match themselves up and standardize so it doesn't degenerate into pure chaos.
- redox99 4y ago
  Why is "dead code elimination" more proper than tree shaking? Is CSS even "code"?
  - TOGoS 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

The immediate is how I code in private Web projects to this day, at work is another matter. If I had a vote on the matter, it would still be fully SSR with a little bit of vanilaJS when need.

g105b 4y ago

I hate all that nonsense, so I don't use it.

wslh 4y ago

Don't forget containerization: instead of just downloading sources, build them and run you need to think all the time outside the core problem. I likte to think about the the term development UX in contrast of end-user/mass UXs.

beej71 4y ago

> not built on a stack of fickle dependencies, fads and ever increasing complexity. Every dependency is a benefit and a liability. It's been interesting to watch this ecosystem grow over the past decade as we collectively explore how much liability we're willing to accept.

tarsinge 4y ago

I got so tired repeating this and trying to convince others that just I created my own agency. Clients are happy, I’m happier, so I guess we are not totally crazy.

GuB-42 4y ago

The more I see the modern web, the more I appreciate PHP (LAMP stack or similar). On the client side, with IE6 more or less gone, most of it can be done with vanilla JS, no need for JQuery anymore. If what you are doing is just another CRUD-based website, there is real need for more, PHP is designed to make that simple. I had a well deserved reputation for poor security, but they got better, and 90% of it is addressed by just using parameterized SQL queries.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

coffeefirst 4y ago

I miss view-source. It used to be you could open up your dev tools and figure out how things were made. And you could learn all sorts of things about architecture and style and techniques this way. Now its all buried in build processes and obfuscation techniques, as if your button handler is a tightly kept secret that's somehow protected by scrambling your variable names. Although the other day I came across a complex app that was built in modern vanilla JS with native ES6 imports alongside regular old CSS. It was a work of art.