4 ms·

Many of the ideas and concepts in htmx are things we worked on starting around 2012 at a top tier investment bank. Implementation details differ quite significa

by mstade 3y ago

Many of the ideas and concepts in htmx are things we worked on starting around 2012 at a top tier investment bank. Implementation details differ quite significantly, but the idea of hypermedia driven applications was core to everything we did. We unfortunately weren't able to win hearts and minds around these concepts in the long run, and blog driven development (a.k.a. cargo culting) replaced our efforts. I feel somewhat redeemed now that HTMX seems to increase in popularity, it's nice to see that we weren't alone in thinking along these concepts. Of course, if the concepts were strong that implies my execution wasn't, so maybe I shouldn't feel so good about it after all... :o)

zogrodea 3y ago
Or your marketing might not have been the best possibly, or people didn't spend enough time with alternative approaches to appreciate their downsides and why hypermedia based solutions could be better. (Just pointing out other possibilities because I don't know if it's a good idea to be hard on oneself when one isn't sure about what went wrong.)
- mstade 3y ago
  These were internally developed tools, so nothing we really marketed externally but yes we definitely could have done a better job at our marketing within the organization. A lot of the criticism to our approach was typically not so much that the ideas were bad, but that they were "different from how everyone else does it" and by everyone else they typically meant Facebook and Google. For example, global state management approaches like Redux were more or less incompatible with how we approached state management. We thought it was insane to build apps around the idea of global state stores (and I still do) but Redux became all the rage and eventually won the day. There was a lot of collateral damage as people then tried to shoehorn Redux everywhere. I left around that time, but hear that the cycle have repeated a few times since. Redux (and other tooling) didn't work out as expected so wheels have been invented again over and over. It's the way things go I guess, I don't dwell too much on it. We probably could've done a better job at communicating why our approach was better, but ultimately we had limited ability to force anyone to use our tooling. There's also a hiring aspect in there. As Redux and other libraries that were "the thing" started to make their way into job descriptions it became harder and harder to convince talent that they should join us, because we didn't have that brand recognition and used in-house tooling. At some point you have to make trade offs and sadly top tier financial institutions aren't necessarily known for leading the pack in terms of innovation. It's kind of sad really. Anyway I'm not particularly hard on myself or bitter about it at all actually. The self deprecating jab about poor execution should be read as tounge-in-cheek really, I'm very proud of the work we did back then.
sodapopcan 3y ago
This was a time when people were shouting "separation of concerns" without really understanding what that meant. Mixing the html/css/js required to make up one discreet UI concern? Heresy! Requiring at least three files to describe a discreet UI concern? TheOneTrueWay!
- gedy 3y ago
  I remember the issue to be also that managing UI state on the server side was a load issue that many places didn’t want to deal with (e.g. Wicket, etc). The vibe at the time JS client apps came out in my circles was "thank God we can get rid of this UI stuff." That’s still an issue I have with HTMX, but I understand for simple use cases it’s fine. I’d rather use HTMX than JQuery that’s for sure.
claytongulick 3y ago
Or it's because you weren't Facebook. Like angular, react got the huge initial boost in popularity because of the brand behind it.
- mstade 3y ago
  Absolutely, brand recognition is hugely important in whether something's a success. It can also go the other way, great ideas and tooling simply die because the brand is tainted. Not everything Microsoft has produced is terrible, but for a while there it seemed all developers I knew couldn't see past the brand even if the tooling/products/ideas were solid. I feel it's gotten better since Nadella took the reins, but the smell still seem to linger sometimes.
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    I agree - I'm a greybeard, so it's a bit of a bizarre world to me where Microsoft is actually a lovely, valued open source brand and probably the most ethical (depending on your definition) of all the big tech companies these days. Time to go snow skiing in hell, I guess. It's deeply frozen over.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    I'd give Microsoft more of a chance, but the way updates and the UI are handled in Windows really puts a sour taste in my mouth. I've heard many good things about stuff like WSL2, PowerShell, and other things that can make Windows feel more accessible for power users, but I'm still looking at a Windows 7 machine without a TPM. I'll be able to update to W10, but after that I'm hosed and have no choice but to 'upgrade' to a chip that has a nanny CPU in it. If Microsoft provided a Developer's Edition of Windows -- without telemetry and ads -- that also came with access to a knowledge-base of best practices for Windows-based software, and why you want to use each major Windows component, for a flat, one-time fee, I'd strongly consider building things for that environment. I feel like Microsoft's current approach of buying their way under the free software world via GitHub is kinda scummy, and all that code's now under Copilot and other LLMs. If they were a bit more upstanding and had a clean, mutually respectful business model, I might consider buying their products. In the mean time, I'd rather use something written by a random hacker, because I can at least read their code, or even hit them up and have a conversation about their project.
bongobingo1 3y ago
> blog driven development (a.k.a. cargo culting) replaced our efforts Ironic considering what the OP attributes to HTMX's current popularity.
- mstade 3y ago
  Fair enough. :o)
SmellTheGlove 3y ago
Nah, look at it this way: A good idea or a good product are never enough. You have to sell the product in order to have it be successful. In your situation, you were at a bank, so your TAM was roughly 1 enterprise (or maybe a dozen, tops, if divisions had federated or siloed tech). And your 1-to-a-handful of potential customers were probably of the large and difficult to change variety. That's a huge constraint, and not landing it there doesn't mean your idea was bad, it just means you weren't successful in selling it and I'm going to tell you that you probably _couldn't_ have been successful in selling it where you were, when you were there. I worked for your lazy cousins at the same time - big insurance - and had the same issues selling my own ideas internally, if that makes you feel any better. HTMX has no such constraints. It's a decade later and the TAM is more or less everyone doing or preferring to do SSR. The same/similar good idea, but different place and time.

by mstade 3y ago

zogrodea 3y ago

Or your marketing might not have been the best possibly, or people didn't spend enough time with alternative approaches to appreciate their downsides and why hypermedia based solutions could be better. (Just pointing out other possibilities because I don't know if it's a good idea to be hard on oneself when one isn't sure about what went wrong.)

mstade 3y ago
These were internally developed tools, so nothing we really marketed externally but yes we definitely could have done a better job at our marketing within the organization. A lot of the criticism to our approach was typically not so much that the ideas were bad, but that they were "different from how everyone else does it" and by everyone else they typically meant Facebook and Google. For example, global state management approaches like Redux were more or less incompatible with how we approached state management. We thought it was insane to build apps around the idea of global state stores (and I still do) but Redux became all the rage and eventually won the day. There was a lot of collateral damage as people then tried to shoehorn Redux everywhere. I left around that time, but hear that the cycle have repeated a few times since. Redux (and other tooling) didn't work out as expected so wheels have been invented again over and over. It's the way things go I guess, I don't dwell too much on it. We probably could've done a better job at communicating why our approach was better, but ultimately we had limited ability to force anyone to use our tooling. There's also a hiring aspect in there. As Redux and other libraries that were "the thing" started to make their way into job descriptions it became harder and harder to convince talent that they should join us, because we didn't have that brand recognition and used in-house tooling. At some point you have to make trade offs and sadly top tier financial institutions aren't necessarily known for leading the pack in terms of innovation. It's kind of sad really. Anyway I'm not particularly hard on myself or bitter about it at all actually. The self deprecating jab about poor execution should be read as tounge-in-cheek really, I'm very proud of the work we did back then.

sodapopcan 3y ago

This was a time when people were shouting "separation of concerns" without really understanding what that meant. Mixing the html/css/js required to make up one discreet UI concern? Heresy! Requiring at least three files to describe a discreet UI concern? TheOneTrueWay!

gedy 3y ago
I remember the issue to be also that managing UI state on the server side was a load issue that many places didn’t want to deal with (e.g. Wicket, etc). The vibe at the time JS client apps came out in my circles was "thank God we can get rid of this UI stuff." That’s still an issue I have with HTMX, but I understand for simple use cases it’s fine. I’d rather use HTMX than JQuery that’s for sure.

claytongulick 3y ago

Or it's because you weren't Facebook. Like angular, react got the huge initial boost in popularity because of the brand behind it.

mstade 3y ago
Absolutely, brand recognition is hugely important in whether something's a success. It can also go the other way, great ideas and tooling simply die because the brand is tainted. Not everything Microsoft has produced is terrible, but for a while there it seemed all developers I knew couldn't see past the brand even if the tooling/products/ideas were solid. I feel it's gotten better since Nadella took the reins, but the smell still seem to linger sometimes.
- claytongulick 3y ago
  I agree - I'm a greybeard, so it's a bit of a bizarre world to me where Microsoft is actually a lovely, valued open source brand and probably the most ethical (depending on your definition) of all the big tech companies these days. Time to go snow skiing in hell, I guess. It's deeply frozen over.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  I'd give Microsoft more of a chance, but the way updates and the UI are handled in Windows really puts a sour taste in my mouth. I've heard many good things about stuff like WSL2, PowerShell, and other things that can make Windows feel more accessible for power users, but I'm still looking at a Windows 7 machine without a TPM. I'll be able to update to W10, but after that I'm hosed and have no choice but to 'upgrade' to a chip that has a nanny CPU in it. If Microsoft provided a Developer's Edition of Windows -- without telemetry and ads -- that also came with access to a knowledge-base of best practices for Windows-based software, and why you want to use each major Windows component, for a flat, one-time fee, I'd strongly consider building things for that environment. I feel like Microsoft's current approach of buying their way under the free software world via GitHub is kinda scummy, and all that code's now under Copilot and other LLMs. If they were a bit more upstanding and had a clean, mutually respectful business model, I might consider buying their products. In the mean time, I'd rather use something written by a random hacker, because I can at least read their code, or even hit them up and have a conversation about their project.

bongobingo1 3y ago

> blog driven development (a.k.a. cargo culting) replaced our efforts Ironic considering what the OP attributes to HTMX's current popularity.

mstade 3y ago
Fair enough. :o)

SmellTheGlove 3y ago

Nah, look at it this way: A good idea or a good product are never enough. You have to sell the product in order to have it be successful. In your situation, you were at a bank, so your TAM was roughly 1 enterprise (or maybe a dozen, tops, if divisions had federated or siloed tech). And your 1-to-a-handful of potential customers were probably of the large and difficult to change variety. That's a huge constraint, and not landing it there doesn't mean your idea was bad, it just means you weren't successful in selling it and I'm going to tell you that you probably _couldn't_ have been successful in selling it where you were, when you were there. I worked for your lazy cousins at the same time - big insurance - and had the same issues selling my own ideas internally, if that makes you feel any better. HTMX has no such constraints. It's a decade later and the TAM is more or less everyone doing or preferring to do SSR. The same/similar good idea, but different place and time.