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>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it Do

>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it Docker is really useful though. It let's you run a completely different set of software than your os stack without the overhead of virtualisation. I find it very useful and I learned programming with basic and 6502 assembler so I have no problem understanding all the abstraction layers down to metal. As for electron it's just a Web browser packaged as an app. In general I agree that "good times create weak people (not just men)" But I very much doubt we can blame the current state of software quality on "good times". Perhaps some of it can be blamed on the fact we didn't really have to optimise a lot of software for performance because new faster hardware would become available like clockwork. But the main problem of today's software quality is not slowness, but as the author shows, crappy ui design and implementation. I have my own theory why that is. Its "agile". Yes, there is good stuff in agile, but designing the UI for an app the user interacts with all the time should be properly designed from the start with a lit of forethought. Not split into 2 week long sprints and 3 day long features people are pushed to undervalue time required for. If we do that, this is the result. If you're a startup running out of cash go for agile. Of you're making devops tools go for agile, but for the UI design? No way.

dudefeliciano 3y ago
Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Anecdotal experience/rant: UX designers seem to increase complexity (maybe to justify their position?) of apps, rather than simplifying. And often "common sense" loses in favor of an over engineered solution.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Lets say you have a population of 1,000 people and 1 doctor. Then lets say you increase the amount of doctors to 3, but by that time your population is 5,000. Yea, you have more doctors than ever, but you also have more problems than ever. And we also see in the medical community more people want more treatment for more things. More staff, less time. It is really easy as the end user to say "Oh, I could have made this much more simple for my workflow". But that's the thing, it's your workflow, you have no idea if that's the average users workflow. You have no idea if the 3% of the customers that pay by far the most money have a different workflow. Complexity typically increases and keeps increasing till market saturation occurs. It's very unlikely we're anywhere close in software saturation (hell this could involve near complete replacement of people in most jobs). Competition means even if you want a simple app, another 'simple' app but with more features is apt to out compete you.
pjmlp 3y ago
Only if the container and host agree on the hardware stack. As for Electron, I don't need to install one browser alongside each app.
- Roark66 3y ago
  I'm not a fan of electron either..
  - eropple 3y ago
    I am. I went from vim to Atom, and then to VSCode, because it was Absolutely Fast Enough (I was using a 2014 rMBP in 2020! it was fine!). You can write slow, chunky crap in Electron, granted. But IntelliJ has been doing that in Java and Swing for years and nobody grinds their axe about that. Electron isn't the problem here. And neither is JavaScript (well, TypeScript--JS itself isn't great). If anything is, a combination of competence and scheduling are the culprits.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Electron is a different problem: lowest common denominator crap. Apps that don't form a cohesive platform, because some product middle-manager wants to piss all over the users desktop to leave their own "branding" scent. The fact that most of them are also poorly engineered is orthogonal.
      - eropple 3y ago
        So maybe it's different from your use case, but I use the same applications on multiple platforms so I don't care about the underlying OS. I'm a browser/terminal/editor sort for the most part, so VSCode acts close-enough to native on Mac, Linux, and Windows, in terms of keyboard shortcuts and affordances (hitting enter to rename on MacOS, for example)--the look of it is completely transparent to me. Balena Etcher's another good example of that. Thing just works.
        3y ago
nradov 3y ago
It usually isn't possible to "properly" design a UI from the start. When it happens it's more luck than skill. Especially with vertical market software where proper UI design requires deep domain expertise that no designer has. The better approach is to put out something crappy as fast as possible and then ask real users for feedback. Iterate on this every 2 weeks until it's good enough.

dudefeliciano 3y ago

Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Anecdotal experience/rant: UX designers seem to increase complexity (maybe to justify their position?) of apps, rather than simplifying. And often "common sense" loses in favor of an over engineered solution.

pixl97 3y ago
>Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Lets say you have a population of 1,000 people and 1 doctor. Then lets say you increase the amount of doctors to 3, but by that time your population is 5,000. Yea, you have more doctors than ever, but you also have more problems than ever. And we also see in the medical community more people want more treatment for more things. More staff, less time. It is really easy as the end user to say "Oh, I could have made this much more simple for my workflow". But that's the thing, it's your workflow, you have no idea if that's the average users workflow. You have no idea if the 3% of the customers that pay by far the most money have a different workflow. Complexity typically increases and keeps increasing till market saturation occurs. It's very unlikely we're anywhere close in software saturation (hell this could involve near complete replacement of people in most jobs). Competition means even if you want a simple app, another 'simple' app but with more features is apt to out compete you.

pjmlp 3y ago

Only if the container and host agree on the hardware stack. As for Electron, I don't need to install one browser alongside each app.

Roark66 3y ago
I'm not a fan of electron either..
- eropple 3y ago
  I am. I went from vim to Atom, and then to VSCode, because it was Absolutely Fast Enough (I was using a 2014 rMBP in 2020! it was fine!). You can write slow, chunky crap in Electron, granted. But IntelliJ has been doing that in Java and Swing for years and nobody grinds their axe about that. Electron isn't the problem here. And neither is JavaScript (well, TypeScript--JS itself isn't great). If anything is, a combination of competence and scheduling are the culprits.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Electron is a different problem: lowest common denominator crap. Apps that don't form a cohesive platform, because some product middle-manager wants to piss all over the users desktop to leave their own "branding" scent. The fact that most of them are also poorly engineered is orthogonal.
    - eropple 3y ago
      So maybe it's different from your use case, but I use the same applications on multiple platforms so I don't care about the underlying OS. I'm a browser/terminal/editor sort for the most part, so VSCode acts close-enough to native on Mac, Linux, and Windows, in terms of keyboard shortcuts and affordances (hitting enter to rename on MacOS, for example)--the look of it is completely transparent to me. Balena Etcher's another good example of that. Thing just works.
      - 3y ago

nradov 3y ago

It usually isn't possible to "properly" design a UI from the start. When it happens it's more luck than skill. Especially with vertical market software where proper UI design requires deep domain expertise that no designer has. The better approach is to put out something crappy as fast as possible and then ask real users for feedback. Iterate on this every 2 weeks until it's good enough.