That’s a good rant but it hits the wrong dudes. We haven’t stopped, we were overwhelmed.
Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users. It’s time for a come-to-jesus moment. This is our fault, and yes, dear reader, you are included in that statement. We are personally responsible for this disaster, and we must do our part to correct it.
No, the examples the author provides are the fault of stubborn people who continue to say that a winword-like text renderer with left-right-justify-float-border-margin is the right tool for applications. There is javascript in the button because otherwise there was javascript at the serverside, or even more javascript to reload the current state into the new tab. Controls have javascript in them because native behavior is so full of bullshit. And why it’s javascript? Because we’re given no choice.
I tried to bring up the topic of “web” “applications” so many times only to hear that I’m wrong and I don’t get it. While having around 15 years of desktop development experience and a couple of ui frameworks that I wrote myself. And clearly seeing the insanity of modern state of things and what they gave birth to. Back in the day I was able to hack together gta:sa vehicle editor or a simple accounting system in pygtk in an hour, now I don’t even know if I want to begin to map state to props and do other bs unrelated to the business itself.
This is what you must do. You must prioritize simplicity. You and I are not smart enough to be clever, so don’t try.
I stopped trying already, let this crap burn in flames and maybe I will still be not dead when the springtime comes.
Design your data, identify error classes
It’s hard to do through layers of what you need to be able build a decent app, but we try hard, really. The author comes from the web1 perspective and feels missing the simplicity of it, but bad news it was already a stupid way to make apps even back then.
Well to be fair I think Drew and I are cut from the same cloth. We write software tons of people use every day but almost none of it is for the web (at least that isn't the core interface generally).
The whole web2 and now web3 stuff mostly passed us by and now we are looking around trying to work out what went so awfully wrong with software development.
The reality is that guys like us still write highly reliable software, some of it even powers the backends of these awfully buggy frontends people rant about.
But you hit the nail on the head. We got outnumbered, overwhelmed and too tired to put up the good fight every day.
When your coworkers want to build the latest app on Node.js + AWS lambda + other hipster nonsense there isn't much you can do other than say "I told you so" when you are the one stuck migrating and cleaning it up 6-12 months later onto something actually reasonable.
You could say that we should do a better job at hiring but often times that is out of our hands, the company hires what is available and increasingly often that is green engineers that don't want to learn old school reliable stuff like Java/C#, they want to be using blog-post/talk-worthy tech stacks and they haven't yet gained the experience that teaches you why that is a poor idea.
So yeah, senior devs that care are out there but we are tired and we aren't able to fix the system from the inside sadly.
Heh I think the contents of the post excuses you for making that assumption. :)
For context he is mostly known for his work around Wayland/Sway but these days he also works on sr.ht which does have a web frontend but it's primary interface is the git protocol.
Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users. It’s time for a come-to-jesus moment. This is our fault, and yes, dear reader, you are included in that statement. We are personally responsible for this disaster, and we must do our part to correct it.
No, the examples the author provides are the fault of stubborn people who continue to say that a winword-like text renderer with left-right-justify-float-border-margin is the right tool for applications. There is javascript in the button because otherwise there was javascript at the serverside, or even more javascript to reload the current state into the new tab. Controls have javascript in them because native behavior is so full of bullshit. And why it’s javascript? Because we’re given no choice.
I tried to bring up the topic of “web” “applications” so many times only to hear that I’m wrong and I don’t get it. While having around 15 years of desktop development experience and a couple of ui frameworks that I wrote myself. And clearly seeing the insanity of modern state of things and what they gave birth to. Back in the day I was able to hack together gta:sa vehicle editor or a simple accounting system in pygtk in an hour, now I don’t even know if I want to begin to map state to props and do other bs unrelated to the business itself.
This is what you must do. You must prioritize simplicity. You and I are not smart enough to be clever, so don’t try.
I stopped trying already, let this crap burn in flames and maybe I will still be not dead when the springtime comes.
Design your data, identify error classes
It’s hard to do through layers of what you need to be able build a decent app, but we try hard, really. The author comes from the web1 perspective and feels missing the simplicity of it, but bad news it was already a stupid way to make apps even back then.