me, 22 years old: "idk web development seems easy and boring"
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me, 22 years old: "idk web development seems easy and boring"
me, 36 years old: <trying to make a “simple" CRUD website and really Learning a Lot Of Things>
i have now been learning how to make websites recreationally on and off for 20 years and every year I have more and more respect for web developers
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@b0rk what do you think it is that makes people underestimate the complexity?
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I always hear that web dev is getting more complicated, but for me personally I feel like it mostly gets simpler over time because
1. all my projects are fun things I do on my own
2. all the old tech still exists and I can still use it
3. as new stuff comes out, I can pick and choose just only the things that will make my life simpler(obviously I understand that “all my websites are fun 1 person projects” doesn’t apply to most “real” web developers, society exists, etc)
(2/?)
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@b0rk I think both is true?
For my personal side projects, I have definitely chosen to simplify my workflow over the years, and have been able to get things off the ground much faster.
As for trying to get hired in the field...some of the jobs' requirements are just a bit too over the top, for me, personally.
But as an enthusiast, this is a great time to be making websites!
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Stefan Bohacekreplied to Stefan Bohacek last edited by
@b0rk Actually, if you're interested, I put this together just the other day: https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/resources-for-keeping-the-web-free-open-and-poetic/
We have some really great tools nowadays, very accessible to beginners, and a ton of inspiration.
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some things that have made web dev simpler for me over the last ~20 years:
* new CSS features like flexbox / grid / etc
* "push to deploy" hosting like github pages, netlify, fly, RIP heroku, etc
* sqlite (I never learned how to use mysql or postgres)
* programming languages that include a production webserver like Go
* let's encrypt
* Caddy is SO much easier to set up than nginx
* Vue.js is much easier for me than jquery or vanilla js ever was
* `async` and `fetch` in javascript(3/?)
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@b0rk sqlite is just such a good idea.
I've never really understood why _all_ databases don't come in a form that runs as a library. Any time you want a db that's only accessed by a single uid, it's a huge inconvenience to run a db server in a separate account and then manage a username and password for the app to log in to it.
If all dbs had this mode, I'd be able to choose 'server or library?' _and_ choose the db whose feature set was best suited to my application. I'd love a libpostgres!
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@simontatham i would love to know why this is, it feels like a Database Person would be able to explain why they're designed this way
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@b0rk @simontatham The PostgreSQL Wiki has a brief explanation on the features we do not want page.
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@ilmari @b0rk 'several very mature embedded SQL databases already available'? I've only ever heard of sqlite. I wonder what others they're thinking of.
My other guess was going to be that coordinating all transactions through one server process allows the server to implement the locking via intraprocess primitives like mutexes, instead of having to mediate locking through only the filesystem.
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@simontatham @ilmari @b0rk Firebird is the obvious candidate alternative to me. A bit old and crafty though I think
In my experience most DB implementations really struggle allowing multiple independent processes to open a DB at once because that opens massive cans of worms around version skew. DB servers can just sidestep that because all connections are served by the same binary -
@polotek ok I thought about this and I think (for me) I've logged into 1000 websites in my life and the login process always feel very similar to me as a user so it feels like implementing a login system should be easy somehow, like it should be a commodity
but today I am trying to implement login and it is not easy and it feels surprising because I've used so many of them (even though every time I have tried to implement login in the past it was also hard)
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@b0rk this is interesting. And it makes sense. The honest answer is that both things are true. If you want a login, you can have one out of the box. But also, we've iterated on auth mechanisms over the years. Trying to reach for new capabilities or enable different things. The capabilities that we want don't remain static. And we often decommodify and recomplicate things so we can try to "innovate" something.
