HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

I'm not aware of exactly what you're looking for, but I think such a resource would be very valuable. Unfortunately, modern web development has almost completely eschewed simplicity. I can offer some leads, though.

This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at https://grugbrain.dev/ which is written by the guy behind https://htmx.org/ -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity.

This recent talk from Djangocon "React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product" might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GObi93tjZI

Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at https://workers.tools/. The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts "no JS is shipped to the client by default". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering.

The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for "the modern Rails".

As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's a lot easier to use them than manage it yourself. And with the new serverless stuff, we're actually pretty close to how CGI on shared hosting used to be where you could upload a script and not have to worry about the gory details so much.

Link to the talk mentioned if you were looking for it as I was: https://youtu.be/3GObi93tjZI

⬐ recursivedoubts

Another user has submitted the htmx summary page on this talk, but here are the numbers:

https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

- The effort took about 2 months (with a 21K LOC code base, mostly JavaScript)

- No reduction in the application's user experience

- They reduced the code base size by 67% (21,500 LOC to 7200 LOC)

- They increased python code by 140% (500 LOC to 1200 LOC), a good thing if you prefer python to JS

- They reduced their total JS dependencies by 96% (255 to 9)

- They reduced their web build time by 88% (40 seconds to 5)

- First load time-to-interactive was reduced by 50-60% (from 2 to 6 seconds to 1 to 2 seconds)

- Much larger data sets were possible when using htmx, because react simply couldn't handle the data

- Web application memory usage was reduced by 46% (75MB to 45MB)

I'm sorry to toot my own libraries horn, here, but these are great number that reflect the fact that the application they are building is very amenable to the hypermedia approach. Many applications being built are similarly amenable to this style of network architecture and would benefit from at least considering the htmx/hypermedia approach.

⬐ henning

The numbers are real. People like me are pissed off and ready for change. Tear it all down.