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> I want to build things for people. Not constantly update my tools because other developers are bored. i find myself getting frustrated really quickly. if i r

> I want to build things for people. Not constantly update my tools because other developers are bored. i find myself getting frustrated really quickly. if i run a node command and it gives error, i have urge to throw laptop out of window or smash it. web dev use to be about immediacy in the late 90s to mid 00s. now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. frustrating and tedious.

zamalek 3y ago
> now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. At least we've moved past webpack, that was a bundle of wires that couldn't ever be completely untangled.
- nopassrecover 3y ago
  Have we finally? That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management. We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal. Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally). I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control. With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard 35 here, started coding when I was 9. Even got into web pre-jquery. Yes things take longer now. Yeah we need different ways of working too. But you know what's cool? Not being pulled into a super critical meeting with client executives at 6am because the site is down and you, the 23 year old kid, are the only person who knows how it works. Team-based work made coding feel like work. And it brought new annoying toolchains and other shenanigans. BUT it also unlocked vacations and the ability to do a thing and move on to a different thing. I rather like that. PS: all my references and cool jokes are out of date and my team mostly gives puzzled looks. The "back in my day" stories are completely unrelatable :(
- schemescape 3y ago
  What came after Webpack?
  - bhandziuk 3y ago
    I just moved to webpack like a year or so ago. It's so great! What is better? I don't know.
  - diarrhea 3y ago
    Enlightenment
  - akvadrako 3y ago
    Vite is pretty standard. Most importantly, it does a lot less by utilising new standards and a reasonable default config.
  - zamalek 3y ago
    I think rollup was the first sane webpack replacement:, significantly less versatile, while significantly more sane.
mikub 3y ago
Unfortunatly it's not only web development, try setting up some microcontroller toolchains. It's all just really tedious, I'm not a professional so maybe the problem is me, but a lot of this tech stuff is just frustrating to work with. Slow unresponsive UI(vscode + platformio) slow startup times(stmCube or arduinoIDE) it's just frustrating sometimes. Whenever I can I try to work with just VIM and install/upload stuff via serial, which is it' own kind of hellish. :)
- karlshea 3y ago
  I have an Ardiuno-based clock kit where I added a firmware customization to support a GPS chip to auto-set the time. If this daylight-savings change goes through in the US I'm going to have to build a new version and I haven't touched it in like six years, I'm sure that's going to go swimmingly.
jpgvm 3y ago
I switched to primarily JVM (Kotlin mostly, some Java) a few years ago and this feeling has for the most part gone away. Having actually stable, actually good tooling/compiler/build systems makes a world of difference to mental health.

zamalek 3y ago

> now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. At least we've moved past webpack, that was a bundle of wires that couldn't ever be completely untangled.

nopassrecover 3y ago
Have we finally? That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management. We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal. Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally). I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control. With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard 35 here, started coding when I was 9. Even got into web pre-jquery. Yes things take longer now. Yeah we need different ways of working too. But you know what's cool? Not being pulled into a super critical meeting with client executives at 6am because the site is down and you, the 23 year old kid, are the only person who knows how it works. Team-based work made coding feel like work. And it brought new annoying toolchains and other shenanigans. BUT it also unlocked vacations and the ability to do a thing and move on to a different thing. I rather like that. PS: all my references and cool jokes are out of date and my team mostly gives puzzled looks. The "back in my day" stories are completely unrelatable :(
schemescape 3y ago
What came after Webpack?
- bhandziuk 3y ago
  I just moved to webpack like a year or so ago. It's so great! What is better? I don't know.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  Enlightenment
- akvadrako 3y ago
  Vite is pretty standard. Most importantly, it does a lot less by utilising new standards and a reasonable default config.
- zamalek 3y ago
  I think rollup was the first sane webpack replacement:, significantly less versatile, while significantly more sane.

mikub 3y ago

Unfortunatly it's not only web development, try setting up some microcontroller toolchains. It's all just really tedious, I'm not a professional so maybe the problem is me, but a lot of this tech stuff is just frustrating to work with. Slow unresponsive UI(vscode + platformio) slow startup times(stmCube or arduinoIDE) it's just frustrating sometimes. Whenever I can I try to work with just VIM and install/upload stuff via serial, which is it' own kind of hellish. :)

karlshea 3y ago
I have an Ardiuno-based clock kit where I added a firmware customization to support a GPS chip to auto-set the time. If this daylight-savings change goes through in the US I'm going to have to build a new version and I haven't touched it in like six years, I'm sure that's going to go swimmingly.

jpgvm 3y ago

I switched to primarily JVM (Kotlin mostly, some Java) a few years ago and this feeling has for the most part gone away. Having actually stable, actually good tooling/compiler/build systems makes a world of difference to mental health.