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Why? Why does it need to be good for big projects in order to be good practice? I’m genuinely asking. I never understood this argument that people bring. In m

Why? Why does it need to be good for big projects in order to be good practice? I’m genuinely asking. I never understood this argument that people bring. In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. Most technologies should be focused on that - simple solutions for simple projectS. Add complexity later.

codeptualize 3y ago
I'd be more than happy to see small or medium projects and how these tips improved them. Any real world examples would be great. I would also add that a lot of us do work on the bigger projects, which makes sense as bigger projects require more people. So at least in my life, and I expect many others, it is quite relevant. I also don't believe the article qualifies that these tips are only for small to medium projects, I'd read it very differently if it did, but I would still like to see some real world examples though.
xgb84j 3y ago
Because in practice there is little value in making easier things easier. While 95% on the web are small projects, 95% of work is done on large projects. Many developers also dislike using many different frameworks, because that would require more learning. If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all. I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. That might be different for you depending on the work you do.
- codeptualize 3y ago
  This. Even for basic websites you benefit from some form of templating/components for example to get the nav & footer on each page.
  - timeon 3y ago
    Even basic websites? It is developer vs user then. I think otherwise. I.e.: blog shouldn't be web app just because it's content management is.
    - codeptualize 3y ago
      Not at all. There are a lot of frameworks that support static exports and/or pre-rendering. Often those produce incredibly fast results, in many cases faster than hand rolled solutions. If you use a CMS you have already a templating situation and dynamic content, using a framework, or jamstack like situation is not that different, depending on the specifics it might produce faster results.
  - zilti 3y ago
    You don't need a frontend framework for that. Fuck people who do. They're the reason most websites are slow as molasses on my three year old phone, despite them being very basic sites. Just stuffed to the brim with unnecessary bullshit.
    - MrJohz 3y ago
      While I agree that there is probably an overuse of frontend rendering when templating in the backend would be fine, I suspect most of the problems you see have nothing to do with that. In my experience, the number one issue with slow sites is an overuse of trackers and advertising that drags everything down.
      - docmars 3y ago
        Precisely. Using libraries / frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, etc. adds nearly no overhead to the core functionality of whatever it is you're creating, _especially Svelte,_ since it compiles down to the bare minimum necessary to power any dynamic functionality (it doesn't ship with a complete runtime), and supports static templates and markdown out of the box. I can say with confidence that unless I royally screw something up in my component lifecycles or render loops, everything is just as snappy as ever. No latency. No lag. Just a zippy fast web app with URL/route changes that fly, fetched data populating quickly, and interactions feeling wonderful -- and that's because said apps I'm developing _aren't_ using any heavy tracking libraries. People are too quick to blame slow performance on modern view libraries, and even likelier: they've never used them before.
- squidbeak 3y ago
  Do you have any data to support that 95% claim? As big as FAANG and other huge development teams are, it seems to me it's still only the tip of the pyramid, with the overwhelming majority of people in the industry working full time on small or midsized projects. It'd be interesting to see some concrete info on it.
  - josephg 3y ago
    I suspect even at Google a lot more than 5% of effort goes into small to midsized projects. Bazel, ninja, protobuf, grpc, the API documentation website for Gmail, VP9, the Google transcode api, takeout, various corp network tools & services and so on. The big projects are of course important. But even chrome needs a simple little website with a download link.
    - xgb84j 3y ago
      That's a good point. I personally always like Angular and React, because even with most simple projects there is this one feature that is so ridiculously complicated that making it slightly easier to develop and maintain is important to me. I'll gladly write thousands of lines of boilerplate just so I make it easier for me to succeed in developing this one endboss feature. If you do not have at least this one insane feature, Angular and React are definitely overkill.
      - marcus_holmes 3y ago
        I always see this as a communication/management failure. Product folks come up with features. They have no idea how hard those features are to implement. Which in a way is a blessing; they'll come up with the best features if they don't have to consider the implementation details. But because there are always trade-offs in implementation they also don't understand those. A feature that is super difficult to implement, and that therefore has trade-offs on speed, maintainability, etc, should be communicated back to the product folks. If you have to move to a framework just to implement this one feature, then that is either because this one feature is really badly or over-designed, or that one feature is absolutely critical to the entire site, which is stupidly rare and again a symptom that someone hasn't really thought this through enough. The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.
- andybak 3y ago
  The "big" projects can do what the hell they want. They can afford to throw a ton of money at a problem. The small projects are where the people I care about are struggling.
  - ceuk 3y ago
    Big project =/= Big company e.g. WhatsApp back before the acquisition Making it easier for people to build big, complex apps doesn't favour large organisations with lots of resources. The opposite in fact.
    - andybak 3y ago
      nb I'm not agreeing with your original hypothesis. However I'm taking about even lower down the food chain than this.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    Are people really struggling at that level, though? It has never been easier to write a complex page with minimal Javascript - there are more and more HTML elements that do what you expect (expandos and modals as some recent examples), Javascript is cleaner and more consistent across browsers (you really don't need jQuery anymore), and CSS is more powerful but also so much simpler (flex+grid solve so many problems). Then if that's not enough, you've got things like HTMX if you're keen on doing everything in terms of html templating, you've got tools like Svelte if you want an isolated chunk of dynamic UI in a mostly static page, you've got bundlers like Vite that just work without any configuration if you get to the point where you need a build step, and you've got a multitude of lightweight frameworks for the next step. And on top of that, pretty much all the old ways still work. The browser is an incredibly stable environment! Outside of a handful of security-related removals, if it got into a mainstream browser, without a feature flag or an explicit "experimental" warning, it's pretty much there for life. So if you want to go back to the old ways, there's not much stopping you - but a whole bunch of quality-of-life development improvements along the way to make things even easier than they were back then.
    - 3y ago
- RunSet 3y ago
  > If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all. > I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. I wonder whether they ever pay off. First, I don't believe the frameworks you mention really, as you suggest, enable the last 5% of functionality that would otherwise be impossible. No, those frameworks are written in the same language they work in, which means that strictly speaking they do not enable any new functionality. Second, whatever ease / speed of development you use must be weighed against the additional cost borne by the project's users. The time you save (that you might otherwise spend learning to achieve the same result without the framework) could be less than the time spent collectively by users waiting for the framework to load.
- up2isomorphism 3y ago
  “95% work is done on large project” this perception might just because you have chosen complex frameworks. Remember google and facebook starts with no frameworks at all. Are they small projects? No.
drpixie 3y ago
Anyway, a well organised big project is a collection of related small projects :) And what's good for one small project is likely to be good for many small projects.
kissgyorgy 3y ago
If your project is small, doesn't matter what you use, it won't be complex anyway.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. In what terms? Sites in existence? I suppose. But sites by usage? Virtually all huge.
ozim 3y ago
I would say that explaining where guidelines are applicable is on author side. For text at hand I understand that author expects this way should be “the best” for everyone. Then author gives examples that even in medium project at first requirement change or first additional non-trivial rule are going to have 2-way bindings plus bunch of other plumbing implemented where “html first” doesn’t have it and someone will have to write some JS monster to handle state etc.
edanm 3y ago
> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. I'm not sure that view is correct. For one thing, I'm not sure how you even define this. As technology has advanced, many of the "small/medium" projects that used to require lots of dev time have turned into fully-built alternatives. The days when you need a dev to setup a blog are gone, as are the days you need one to setup a store, or a simple marketing website. Are these part of the 95%? In some sense, yes, but in the sense of giving advice on a framework to choose, not at all, because no dev will even be making that choice - it's irrelevant. As for medium-sized projects, there are tens of thousands of small, internal company tools that aren't even on the open internet. They probably fit your definition of being medium sized, let's say have a few devs working on them for many years, certainly medium sized compared to FB etc - but I'm not sure that whether this approach is right or wrong for them. (Genuinely not sure!) I'm just saying, you need to much better define what you mean by small and medium sized, because some people might be thinking of my definition, while for some people medium-sized is, idk, AirBNB, which is tiny compared to FB but gigantic compared to most projects out there.
elbear 3y ago
This is not only about big projects. Their second principle, to use inline styling, makes it harder to create a consistent look across the entire website. Defining that in one place and referencing it everywhere is better and easier.
hhsectech 3y ago
This. Big companies are in the minority and what they do would not classify as "normal" or "standard practice". It really bugs when people say "it's standard industry practice" when actually what they mean is "thats how the big businesses do it".

codeptualize 3y ago

I'd be more than happy to see small or medium projects and how these tips improved them. Any real world examples would be great. I would also add that a lot of us do work on the bigger projects, which makes sense as bigger projects require more people. So at least in my life, and I expect many others, it is quite relevant. I also don't believe the article qualifies that these tips are only for small to medium projects, I'd read it very differently if it did, but I would still like to see some real world examples though.

xgb84j 3y ago

Because in practice there is little value in making easier things easier. While 95% on the web are small projects, 95% of work is done on large projects. Many developers also dislike using many different frameworks, because that would require more learning. If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all. I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. That might be different for you depending on the work you do.

codeptualize 3y ago
This. Even for basic websites you benefit from some form of templating/components for example to get the nav & footer on each page.
- timeon 3y ago
  Even basic websites? It is developer vs user then. I think otherwise. I.e.: blog shouldn't be web app just because it's content management is.
  - codeptualize 3y ago
    Not at all. There are a lot of frameworks that support static exports and/or pre-rendering. Often those produce incredibly fast results, in many cases faster than hand rolled solutions. If you use a CMS you have already a templating situation and dynamic content, using a framework, or jamstack like situation is not that different, depending on the specifics it might produce faster results.
- zilti 3y ago
  You don't need a frontend framework for that. Fuck people who do. They're the reason most websites are slow as molasses on my three year old phone, despite them being very basic sites. Just stuffed to the brim with unnecessary bullshit.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    While I agree that there is probably an overuse of frontend rendering when templating in the backend would be fine, I suspect most of the problems you see have nothing to do with that. In my experience, the number one issue with slow sites is an overuse of trackers and advertising that drags everything down.
    - docmars 3y ago
      Precisely. Using libraries / frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, etc. adds nearly no overhead to the core functionality of whatever it is you're creating, _especially Svelte,_ since it compiles down to the bare minimum necessary to power any dynamic functionality (it doesn't ship with a complete runtime), and supports static templates and markdown out of the box. I can say with confidence that unless I royally screw something up in my component lifecycles or render loops, everything is just as snappy as ever. No latency. No lag. Just a zippy fast web app with URL/route changes that fly, fetched data populating quickly, and interactions feeling wonderful -- and that's because said apps I'm developing _aren't_ using any heavy tracking libraries. People are too quick to blame slow performance on modern view libraries, and even likelier: they've never used them before.
squidbeak 3y ago
Do you have any data to support that 95% claim? As big as FAANG and other huge development teams are, it seems to me it's still only the tip of the pyramid, with the overwhelming majority of people in the industry working full time on small or midsized projects. It'd be interesting to see some concrete info on it.
- josephg 3y ago
  I suspect even at Google a lot more than 5% of effort goes into small to midsized projects. Bazel, ninja, protobuf, grpc, the API documentation website for Gmail, VP9, the Google transcode api, takeout, various corp network tools & services and so on. The big projects are of course important. But even chrome needs a simple little website with a download link.
  - xgb84j 3y ago
    That's a good point. I personally always like Angular and React, because even with most simple projects there is this one feature that is so ridiculously complicated that making it slightly easier to develop and maintain is important to me. I'll gladly write thousands of lines of boilerplate just so I make it easier for me to succeed in developing this one endboss feature. If you do not have at least this one insane feature, Angular and React are definitely overkill.
    - marcus_holmes 3y ago
      I always see this as a communication/management failure. Product folks come up with features. They have no idea how hard those features are to implement. Which in a way is a blessing; they'll come up with the best features if they don't have to consider the implementation details. But because there are always trade-offs in implementation they also don't understand those. A feature that is super difficult to implement, and that therefore has trade-offs on speed, maintainability, etc, should be communicated back to the product folks. If you have to move to a framework just to implement this one feature, then that is either because this one feature is really badly or over-designed, or that one feature is absolutely critical to the entire site, which is stupidly rare and again a symptom that someone hasn't really thought this through enough. The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.
andybak 3y ago
The "big" projects can do what the hell they want. They can afford to throw a ton of money at a problem. The small projects are where the people I care about are struggling.
- ceuk 3y ago
  Big project =/= Big company e.g. WhatsApp back before the acquisition Making it easier for people to build big, complex apps doesn't favour large organisations with lots of resources. The opposite in fact.
  - andybak 3y ago
    nb I'm not agreeing with your original hypothesis. However I'm taking about even lower down the food chain than this.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  Are people really struggling at that level, though? It has never been easier to write a complex page with minimal Javascript - there are more and more HTML elements that do what you expect (expandos and modals as some recent examples), Javascript is cleaner and more consistent across browsers (you really don't need jQuery anymore), and CSS is more powerful but also so much simpler (flex+grid solve so many problems). Then if that's not enough, you've got things like HTMX if you're keen on doing everything in terms of html templating, you've got tools like Svelte if you want an isolated chunk of dynamic UI in a mostly static page, you've got bundlers like Vite that just work without any configuration if you get to the point where you need a build step, and you've got a multitude of lightweight frameworks for the next step. And on top of that, pretty much all the old ways still work. The browser is an incredibly stable environment! Outside of a handful of security-related removals, if it got into a mainstream browser, without a feature flag or an explicit "experimental" warning, it's pretty much there for life. So if you want to go back to the old ways, there's not much stopping you - but a whole bunch of quality-of-life development improvements along the way to make things even easier than they were back then.
  - 3y ago
RunSet 3y ago
> If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all. > I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. I wonder whether they ever pay off. First, I don't believe the frameworks you mention really, as you suggest, enable the last 5% of functionality that would otherwise be impossible. No, those frameworks are written in the same language they work in, which means that strictly speaking they do not enable any new functionality. Second, whatever ease / speed of development you use must be weighed against the additional cost borne by the project's users. The time you save (that you might otherwise spend learning to achieve the same result without the framework) could be less than the time spent collectively by users waiting for the framework to load.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
“95% work is done on large project” this perception might just because you have chosen complex frameworks. Remember google and facebook starts with no frameworks at all. Are they small projects? No.

drpixie 3y ago

Anyway, a well organised big project is a collection of related small projects :) And what's good for one small project is likely to be good for many small projects.

kissgyorgy 3y ago

If your project is small, doesn't matter what you use, it won't be complex anyway.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. In what terms? Sites in existence? I suppose. But sites by usage? Virtually all huge.

ozim 3y ago

I would say that explaining where guidelines are applicable is on author side. For text at hand I understand that author expects this way should be “the best” for everyone. Then author gives examples that even in medium project at first requirement change or first additional non-trivial rule are going to have 2-way bindings plus bunch of other plumbing implemented where “html first” doesn’t have it and someone will have to write some JS monster to handle state etc.

edanm 3y ago

> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. I'm not sure that view is correct. For one thing, I'm not sure how you even define this. As technology has advanced, many of the "small/medium" projects that used to require lots of dev time have turned into fully-built alternatives. The days when you need a dev to setup a blog are gone, as are the days you need one to setup a store, or a simple marketing website. Are these part of the 95%? In some sense, yes, but in the sense of giving advice on a framework to choose, not at all, because no dev will even be making that choice - it's irrelevant. As for medium-sized projects, there are tens of thousands of small, internal company tools that aren't even on the open internet. They probably fit your definition of being medium sized, let's say have a few devs working on them for many years, certainly medium sized compared to FB etc - but I'm not sure that whether this approach is right or wrong for them. (Genuinely not sure!) I'm just saying, you need to much better define what you mean by small and medium sized, because some people might be thinking of my definition, while for some people medium-sized is, idk, AirBNB, which is tiny compared to FB but gigantic compared to most projects out there.

elbear 3y ago

This is not only about big projects. Their second principle, to use inline styling, makes it harder to create a consistent look across the entire website. Defining that in one place and referencing it everywhere is better and easier.

hhsectech 3y ago

This. Big companies are in the minority and what they do would not classify as "normal" or "standard practice". It really bugs when people say "it's standard industry practice" when actually what they mean is "thats how the big businesses do it".