5 ms·

Web development as practiced by the majority of the industry is truly insane and depressing. No one has any idea what they are doing. Here's what I'm aiming to

by hsn915 4y ago

Web development as practiced by the majority of the industry is truly insane and depressing. No one has any idea what they are doing. Here's what I'm aiming to do: learn systems programming on the side, accumulate enough savings to live off of for nearly a year, then go independent and continue learning systems programming "as I go". Build software products on my own and start selling them.

sedeki 4y ago
I want to do something similar. Do you want to connect?
- hsn915 4y ago
  Sure, I updated my bio with contact info.
mkl 4y ago
Why not leverage what you know and build web-based products/services?
- badpun 4y ago
  For a lot of people with technology taste, the web is offensive. Not to say that interfacing with say ugly Windows APIs is that much better, but at least you have way more control over the machine and your program, so (in systems programming) interfacing with ugly abstraction is only a minor part of your experience.
  - type0 4y ago
    The trouble isn't just that it's offensive for people with technology understanding and taste, but the clients in web space often consider the tech and your work as disposable and they treat you as such.
    - badpun 4y ago
      Interesting. My previous company (large bank) really cherished the front-end devs on our team, because they knew how hard and annoying it would be to hire replacements for them. They definitely were not treated as disposable.
  - torginus 4y ago
    The weird thing is the browser is amazing - it's a great 3D rendering, video and playing, video conferencing, UI displaying and animating, vector and raster graphics drawing etc. thing. And probably I barely scratched the surface with my list. It does all of these things either as good as the best native apps or at least quite competently. And it's all portable. No wonder Electron has eaten the native app scene. But the JS ecosystem with its myriad frameworks, packers, metalanguages, each halfway between immature and deprecated, and constant churn and breakage is an absolute nightmare.
    - badpun 4y ago
      Browser is not great for 3D rendering, unless you mean 3D rendering like it's still 2005 (performance-wise). The browser is not able to handle any modern AAA games for example. Also, the browser does not have an out-of-the box set of standard UI widgets, which makes every browser-based (Electron) app redefine them in its unique way.
- hsn915 4y ago
  It will be indeed web related, but not a hosted service with a monthly recurring subscription. Instead, a stand-along product that would allow you to "own" your web presense and not be tied to any specific company.
- porker 4y ago
  > Why not leverage what you know and build web-based products/services? Because it's really difficult. I find I can keep a big-picture, this is what the customer wants mindset, or I can have a detail-oriented this is the code that I want to improve mindset, but having both and/or switching between them is amazingly difficult. As I write the code I lose sight of what 'normal' people (non-programmers) want. I don't even know how to pitch to their level any more, or what isn't obvious to people who haven't spent 20+ years using and thinking about computers every day. tl;dr: programming changes the way I think in a way that's unhelpful to build a product. Next there's promotion and marketing... which is another skillset that depending how hard you want to push the product may/may not sit well with your ethics. Thirdly and this is a personal one, I have an ADD brain and staying focused on one idea long enough to take it to market is very difficult. I have a list of ideas I dreamed up and started work on and never finished that someone else later launched successfully. As does everyone I suspect (execution >> ideas) but it's a neverending pattern (as I look at the 30+ OS projects on the go)
  - hsn915 4y ago
    I've seen several people echo this, but for me it's the opposite. I start from the end goal and all the code is only there to serve the end goal. The end goal usually being the product and the value it's supposed to provide to its users. What I have trouble with is marketing and sales. I've never sold anything directly to consumers, so that will be the most challenging thing when going independent: selling to people. Let's say I sell the product for $50, I would have to sell to 2000 people in one year to make $100k, which means I have to sell to at least 6 people per day. Now it would be great if people just found the product and bought it on their own, but at least the first 1000 costumers must be acquired "manually" so to speak for the business to even take off.
mkl95 4y ago
I have spent my whole career in webdev and I couldn't agree more. A common pattern is that there's a bullshit-free option to solve some problem, but someone wants you to solve it in a stupid and painful way. I sometimes wish I was experienced in some other field so I could move on. The money is good but that's about it.
- hsn915 4y ago
  Most of the money is in the bullshit stuff. You will get paid more if you are a webpack ninja than if you know how to setup a simple esbuild script. You will get paid more if you have wizard level knowledge of k8s and docker than if you can program something that solves your problems as a simple single program running on a single server.
koonsolo 4y ago
The problem is that "web-development" encompasses everything from a simple static website all the way to complex web applications. And because of this generic term, I see people making stupid mistakes all the time. React is great for web apps, but then you see the static pages being built by that, and you think WTF. Next thing some of these morons move back to server side rendering, discover how much better it is for SEO etc. But the problem is that the web-app folks read this, think they now all of a sudden have to move to SSR because big company X did this for their landing page. It's truely stupid. So I think we should split the term "web development" into proper subsections, so it becomes clear what camp you are in. If you're a website builder who does a bit of JS for some menu popups, good luck having a team of these guys writing the next google docs (no offense here, each their own specialization) But on the same ground, having a bunch of pro front-end coders build a simple website is also stupid, because they will choose technologies way too complex for that.
- xuding 4y ago
  Have you tried the website builder for Google Sheets: https://sitefast.live https://sitefast.live yet?

by hsn915 4y ago

sedeki 4y ago

I want to do something similar. Do you want to connect?

hsn915 4y ago
Sure, I updated my bio with contact info.

mkl 4y ago

Why not leverage what you know and build web-based products/services?

badpun 4y ago
For a lot of people with technology taste, the web is offensive. Not to say that interfacing with say ugly Windows APIs is that much better, but at least you have way more control over the machine and your program, so (in systems programming) interfacing with ugly abstraction is only a minor part of your experience.
- type0 4y ago
  The trouble isn't just that it's offensive for people with technology understanding and taste, but the clients in web space often consider the tech and your work as disposable and they treat you as such.
  - badpun 4y ago
    Interesting. My previous company (large bank) really cherished the front-end devs on our team, because they knew how hard and annoying it would be to hire replacements for them. They definitely were not treated as disposable.
- torginus 4y ago
  The weird thing is the browser is amazing - it's a great 3D rendering, video and playing, video conferencing, UI displaying and animating, vector and raster graphics drawing etc. thing. And probably I barely scratched the surface with my list. It does all of these things either as good as the best native apps or at least quite competently. And it's all portable. No wonder Electron has eaten the native app scene. But the JS ecosystem with its myriad frameworks, packers, metalanguages, each halfway between immature and deprecated, and constant churn and breakage is an absolute nightmare.
  - badpun 4y ago
    Browser is not great for 3D rendering, unless you mean 3D rendering like it's still 2005 (performance-wise). The browser is not able to handle any modern AAA games for example. Also, the browser does not have an out-of-the box set of standard UI widgets, which makes every browser-based (Electron) app redefine them in its unique way.
hsn915 4y ago
It will be indeed web related, but not a hosted service with a monthly recurring subscription. Instead, a stand-along product that would allow you to "own" your web presense and not be tied to any specific company.
porker 4y ago
> Why not leverage what you know and build web-based products/services? Because it's really difficult. I find I can keep a big-picture, this is what the customer wants mindset, or I can have a detail-oriented this is the code that I want to improve mindset, but having both and/or switching between them is amazingly difficult. As I write the code I lose sight of what 'normal' people (non-programmers) want. I don't even know how to pitch to their level any more, or what isn't obvious to people who haven't spent 20+ years using and thinking about computers every day. tl;dr: programming changes the way I think in a way that's unhelpful to build a product. Next there's promotion and marketing... which is another skillset that depending how hard you want to push the product may/may not sit well with your ethics. Thirdly and this is a personal one, I have an ADD brain and staying focused on one idea long enough to take it to market is very difficult. I have a list of ideas I dreamed up and started work on and never finished that someone else later launched successfully. As does everyone I suspect (execution >> ideas) but it's a neverending pattern (as I look at the 30+ OS projects on the go)
- hsn915 4y ago
  I've seen several people echo this, but for me it's the opposite. I start from the end goal and all the code is only there to serve the end goal. The end goal usually being the product and the value it's supposed to provide to its users. What I have trouble with is marketing and sales. I've never sold anything directly to consumers, so that will be the most challenging thing when going independent: selling to people. Let's say I sell the product for $50, I would have to sell to 2000 people in one year to make $100k, which means I have to sell to at least 6 people per day. Now it would be great if people just found the product and bought it on their own, but at least the first 1000 costumers must be acquired "manually" so to speak for the business to even take off.

mkl95 4y ago

I have spent my whole career in webdev and I couldn't agree more. A common pattern is that there's a bullshit-free option to solve some problem, but someone wants you to solve it in a stupid and painful way. I sometimes wish I was experienced in some other field so I could move on. The money is good but that's about it.

hsn915 4y ago
Most of the money is in the bullshit stuff. You will get paid more if you are a webpack ninja than if you know how to setup a simple esbuild script. You will get paid more if you have wizard level knowledge of k8s and docker than if you can program something that solves your problems as a simple single program running on a single server.

koonsolo 4y ago

The problem is that "web-development" encompasses everything from a simple static website all the way to complex web applications. And because of this generic term, I see people making stupid mistakes all the time. React is great for web apps, but then you see the static pages being built by that, and you think WTF. Next thing some of these morons move back to server side rendering, discover how much better it is for SEO etc. But the problem is that the web-app folks read this, think they now all of a sudden have to move to SSR because big company X did this for their landing page. It's truely stupid. So I think we should split the term "web development" into proper subsections, so it becomes clear what camp you are in. If you're a website builder who does a bit of JS for some menu popups, good luck having a team of these guys writing the next google docs (no offense here, each their own specialization) But on the same ground, having a bunch of pro front-end coders build a simple website is also stupid, because they will choose technologies way too complex for that.

xuding 4y ago
Have you tried the website builder for Google Sheets: https://sitefast.live https://sitefast.live yet?