4 ms·

> It is no longer easy to build software It is very easy if you know the right tools for the right job, but information about these are suppressed so you never

> It is no longer easy to build software It is very easy if you know the right tools for the right job, but information about these are suppressed so you never hear about them. What the vast majority of people think the tech tooling landscape looks like and what it actually looks like are very different. The tools we know about are mostly horrible. They try to be silver bullets but they're really not good for anything... Yet they're the most popular tools. I think it's about capital influence, as hinted by the article. For example, with the tool I'm using now, I made a video showing how to build a relatively complex marketplace app (5+ pages) in 3 hours with login, access control, schema validation, complex filtered views from scratch using only a browser and without downloading any software (serverless). The whole app is less than 700 lines of HTML markup and 12 lines of JavaScript code. The video got like 10 views.

bckr 2y ago
Link it!
- dualogy 2y ago
  Although not sure, I guess socketcluster might be referring to what is further elaborated on in these earlier posts I just quickly stalked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40530828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40530828
- socketcluster 2y ago
  Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0PJ1KlxDtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0PJ1KlxDtM
tavavex 2y ago
> with the tool I'm using now Correction: with the tool you created and are not-so-subtly trying to market right now. Complete with an $18/mo subscription fee, no users and (of course) a cryptocurrency that's fueled by promises and hype. No, despite the conspiratorial twist, modern tooling is more flexible and easier to use than ever before. It has flaws, but those flaws are nothing compared to what developers had to go through a couple of decades ago. There's no big collusion to cover up your tool.
m3047 2y ago
Web3 / popular crypto is not my bailiwick (although I like math and so unpopular crypto). Your video is three hours long, I'm not going to watch the whole thing, and leave it at that. That's not a slight, but three hours for something which I already feel isn't going to deliver something I can use today, next week, or this month. I'm a big believer in no/low code and run-anywhere... although those might also not mean what you think I mean. Props for you for doing it. So, I started watching your video and the first question I had was: what are Codespaces? How is it secured? Where does the final app run? Can I run it on my hardware? Can I run it without cloud access? Which cloud? Will it be around next week, next month, next year... ten years from now? However don't pay too much attention to a sample of one. ;-) I think the situation with no/low code can be summed up by analogy to desktop publishing. There is no CI/CD pipeline for DTP: you press print; it is a fully integrated environment... unlike literally all of the "continuous integration" environments which try so hard they can't stop shouting about it because it's eating them alive. Somewhere there might be a tool for generating color seps, setting gutters, importing fonts or creating postscript header libraries or LaTeX; but you'll never use it or see it. Somewhere, somebody is still doing multi-plate prints with pigments exhibiting greater variety than CMYK that are only vibrant in natural light; most people don't see the point because all they get is a crappy snapshot on their phone. It's not just a creator problem, consumers don't know what's possible and don't possess devices which fully reveal the full scope of what's possible. Consumer devices actively compromise that full scope for myriad walled-garden reasons, as well as run-of-the-mill negligence and ignorance. I got a Cadillac as a rental a few years ago, and I'll never buy a modern Cadillac and avoid driving one if possible. I couldn't control the windshield wipers, and the console display flashed the most attention-grabbing WARNING several times that I was not looking at the road, presumably because it couldn't suss that I was wearing glasses. I didn't actually look at the console display since it happened at high speeds in heavy traffic on an unfamiliar road (I had a passenger, and I asked them "WTF is that flashing screen saying??!?"); good job, Cadillac!
- socketcluster 2y ago
  Saasufy supports rollover deployment. It's serverless, meaning you don't need to write any server-side code. You just define the collections, schema, views/filters, access controls then deploy. It's radically different from anything that's out there. It makes it impossible to introduce back end bugs or security flaws (assuming that access control rules are defined correctly; which is a lot easier to verify via a simple UI than reading thousands of lines of back end code). Look at this app I built with it on the side: https://www.insnare.net/ https://www.insnare.net/ It's only ~1300 lines of custom code in total. Most of it is HTML. Throughout the entire process from start to finish, I never encountered a single back end bug. Deployment essentially never fails; the UI doesn't let you do anything invalid and it helps avoid inefficient queries. Yet look at the complexity of what kinds of queries and filters I can run against the data and all the different views. It has almost 1 million records... Indexes are not even fully optimized. Look at the data that's behind access control/associated with specific accounts (e.g. the Longlists). Go ahead and try to bypass access controls... The WebSocket API is documented here: https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/wiki/WebSocket-API https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/wiki/WebSocket... It would normally have taken months and tens of thousands of lines of code (front end and back end) to build that. The value is there in terms of security, development efficiency, maintainability etc... The hard part is getting people to see it.

bckr 2y ago

Link it!

dualogy 2y ago
Although not sure, I guess socketcluster might be referring to what is further elaborated on in these earlier posts I just quickly stalked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40530828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40530828
socketcluster 2y ago
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0PJ1KlxDtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0PJ1KlxDtM

tavavex 2y ago

> with the tool I'm using now Correction: with the tool you created and are not-so-subtly trying to market right now. Complete with an $18/mo subscription fee, no users and (of course) a cryptocurrency that's fueled by promises and hype. No, despite the conspiratorial twist, modern tooling is more flexible and easier to use than ever before. It has flaws, but those flaws are nothing compared to what developers had to go through a couple of decades ago. There's no big collusion to cover up your tool.

m3047 2y ago

Web3 / popular crypto is not my bailiwick (although I like math and so unpopular crypto). Your video is three hours long, I'm not going to watch the whole thing, and leave it at that. That's not a slight, but three hours for something which I already feel isn't going to deliver something I can use today, next week, or this month. I'm a big believer in no/low code and run-anywhere... although those might also not mean what you think I mean. Props for you for doing it. So, I started watching your video and the first question I had was: what are Codespaces? How is it secured? Where does the final app run? Can I run it on my hardware? Can I run it without cloud access? Which cloud? Will it be around next week, next month, next year... ten years from now? However don't pay too much attention to a sample of one. ;-) I think the situation with no/low code can be summed up by analogy to desktop publishing. There is no CI/CD pipeline for DTP: you press print; it is a fully integrated environment... unlike literally all of the "continuous integration" environments which try so hard they can't stop shouting about it because it's eating them alive. Somewhere there might be a tool for generating color seps, setting gutters, importing fonts or creating postscript header libraries or LaTeX; but you'll never use it or see it. Somewhere, somebody is still doing multi-plate prints with pigments exhibiting greater variety than CMYK that are only vibrant in natural light; most people don't see the point because all they get is a crappy snapshot on their phone. It's not just a creator problem, consumers don't know what's possible and don't possess devices which fully reveal the full scope of what's possible. Consumer devices actively compromise that full scope for myriad walled-garden reasons, as well as run-of-the-mill negligence and ignorance. I got a Cadillac as a rental a few years ago, and I'll never buy a modern Cadillac and avoid driving one if possible. I couldn't control the windshield wipers, and the console display flashed the most attention-grabbing WARNING several times that I was not looking at the road, presumably because it couldn't suss that I was wearing glasses. I didn't actually look at the console display since it happened at high speeds in heavy traffic on an unfamiliar road (I had a passenger, and I asked them "WTF is that flashing screen saying??!?"); good job, Cadillac!

socketcluster 2y ago
Saasufy supports rollover deployment. It's serverless, meaning you don't need to write any server-side code. You just define the collections, schema, views/filters, access controls then deploy. It's radically different from anything that's out there. It makes it impossible to introduce back end bugs or security flaws (assuming that access control rules are defined correctly; which is a lot easier to verify via a simple UI than reading thousands of lines of back end code). Look at this app I built with it on the side: https://www.insnare.net/ https://www.insnare.net/ It's only ~1300 lines of custom code in total. Most of it is HTML. Throughout the entire process from start to finish, I never encountered a single back end bug. Deployment essentially never fails; the UI doesn't let you do anything invalid and it helps avoid inefficient queries. Yet look at the complexity of what kinds of queries and filters I can run against the data and all the different views. It has almost 1 million records... Indexes are not even fully optimized. Look at the data that's behind access control/associated with specific accounts (e.g. the Longlists). Go ahead and try to bypass access controls... The WebSocket API is documented here: https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/wiki/WebSocket-API https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/wiki/WebSocket... It would normally have taken months and tens of thousands of lines of code (front end and back end) to build that. The value is there in terms of security, development efficiency, maintainability etc... The hard part is getting people to see it.