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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Incoming semi-related rant

Incoming semi-related rant. This doesn't apply to LLMs writing code, and it is quite an aside, but I think we have destroyed a lot of ways the web works by chasing a "good" dev experience. It is "nicer" to write JSX and Typescript in a Next.js project than it was to write jQuery in inline script tags on WordPress. No doubt. But I never had issues maintaining, scaling, updating, or improving those old sites. And I definitely wasn't nickel and dimed for every feature/service I needed to add. I didn't have to wait for builds, or compiling, or worry about the deployment Node.js being a different version than the local Node.js. Or "open source" framework features being locked to certain hosts (looking at you RSC and Next.13) and their platforms. And the worst thing, coming back to a project after a couple years and it being impossible to get working because all the tooling has changed and/or been abandoned. I recently had a client from 8 years ago want to move their hosting. They had been sitting on a PHP/Laravel-based CMS, hosted on DigitalOcean, paying $10 a month for ~7 years. …

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KR

I think this is mostly your own personal experience and likely a bit rose tinted. It is perfectly possible to deploy a webapp in React that will last for 10 years more or less how a website from 10 years ago could still function today. Also jQuery's very existence was due to how much of a disaster writing webapps was in the past with the host of compatibility issues between not only browsers but just within versions of the same browser. Also there's no issue scaling WordPress? WordPress is notoriously slow and hard to scale. It's a great option for getting a basic website up and running quickly but by God is it a slow and bloated mess and while you can performance tune it, it's not at all a simple or straight forward process and it certainly wasn't easier 10 years ago. I've been a web developer since 1998 and it's definitely much easier to deploy, maintain and scale websites today than i…

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BR

surely they upgraded their OS, and the packages to patch security vulnerabilities, right? Long uptimes aren't always great, when it comes at the expense of security.

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WK

I think you're getting some causality twisted - websites started getting more brittle (if they did?) when they started getting more complex, and they started getting more complex precisely because better dev tooling enabled it.

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