HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

⬐ solarmist

This was hilarious! I cried hard.

⬐ an1sotropy

"global variables? no one use them!" (scrolling through code) "... must be somewhere in window ..."

Interview with Senior JS Developer in 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

I totally agree, the range in number of servers/services/technologies different companies use to solve similar problems are SO wide.

After 12 years of growth we are still happily on:

  - 1 Ubuntu server
  - 1 MySQL db
  - 1 Django framework
  - Ansible for deployment

And thats mostly it. Due to Hetzner missing the 27002 certification we moved from metal to Amazon EC2 instances which was pretty uneventful. We also moved to Aurora and the point-in-time restores actually makes me sleep better at night. Relative to Hetzner it's a lot more expensive. Not at all a problem in the absolute sense.

Some years back I had a chance to talk with the CTO of a company very similar to ours, and their landscape was 400+ microservices, 50 servers managed by k8s on Azure Cloud, Service bridges, Workflow engines, 5 different DB engines, etc. It sounded very fascinating, but also quite complicated.

Some of my worst decisions over the years has been not having the balls to say no to current best-practices. I've learned the hard way that even though the pressure of using shining-new-thingTM can be immense it's so important to realise that everything always has pros and cons. The most important thing is trying to really understand _my_ specific problem and _then_ using the simplest and most obvious solution that can work.

Obligatory "Programmers are also human" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

The biggest crimes of web frameworks is they take you away into abstraction land away from the actual standards and they complexify simplicity, all of that under the guise of being more "standard" and more "simple". It is one of the greatest lies ever sold.

I remember how .NET WebForms and lots of Java boilerplate frameworks did that early on, or browsers breaking standards, they wanted developer lock-in just like web frameworks of today. They wanted to keep developers dumb by being "simple" as long as you stay in their walled garden where they handle the standards. No thanks...

I have been developing javascript for decades and I actually liked the original less Java like boilerplate of the previous iterations, and you can still do that. The people that push frameworks aren't always trying to make things more simple, they want control, lock-in and domain ownership. The last tool to really simplify in javascript was jquery and most of that is browser level now including selection the killer feature of jquery across all those document.all/document.layer days of pain. Those days are over, simplicity is being complexified now.

Tools like jquery and even Flash or other plugins were platform pushers that got the web to the place we have now which is better than ever for web standards, yet we have all these bloated frameworks on top now. In a way it is a bit like the xkcd comic with so many standards, just to not do javascript people built thousands of frameworks on top to "simplify" the standards that are simple now.

While web frameworks may have been needed for a time, and in certain team based scenarios, they are a crutch, a maintenance problem long term, they take actual standards out of experience and the worst is they make the simple complex. Web frameworks have become the DLL hell or dependency deepend that used to be used to attack other platforms. .NET and Java have less bloat now and are moving more standard, while javascript web frameworks only pretend to.

The web standards of today are amazing and take away the nee for frameworks today: from templating to html templates [1], vanilla javascript with classes [2] and async [3] and better api access like fetch [4] and browser support for vdom with shadow dom [5], components with WebComponents [6][7], css now with lots of additions like variables [8] transitions[9]/animations[10], flex and media queries, canvas/svg/etc for interactivity, and so much more. There is little need to use frameworks except to sell books and conferences and keep developers locked in.

As developers/engineers, the job is taking complexity and simplifying, ask yourself if your framework abstraction is doing that above actual standards that is a pain long term to maintain. Web frameworks were supposed to work together, they are now behemoth monoliths that limit dynamic and fluid systems that scripting are supposed to bring. People went out and made a scripting language for glue into Java boilerplate...

In areas like targeting a certain javascript ECMA version or polyfills, those are still worthy, the other pile of verbose bloat abstraction that is there is just that, a pile of "verbloat". "Verbloat" is a new word to define frameworks of today sold in as small helpers to replace jquery, that have grown to the size of dev lock-in tar pits. No developer in their right mind would use this for products/projects they control unless they have to at this point.

Basically this video summarizes the absolute unnecessary adventure of web frameworks and provides some comic relief to the absurdity of it all. [11]

[1] https://caniuse.com/template

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/U...

[5] https://caniuse.com/shadowdomv1

[6] https://caniuse.com/custom-elementsv1

[7] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components

[8] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_c...

[9] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transition

[10] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/animation

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

⬐ ericsilly

Great write up!

⬐ hackerfromthefu

I wish this comment was pinned to the top of every Javascript discussion thread!