tefi know i'm old but i've learned what the front end devs are up to now and i'm both yelling at the cloud and telling the kids to get off my lawn
it amazes me that "please show me all the posts in the order they were made in" now takes three different types of per-request billing to run in the cloud
look, i know it's a thing where someone who doesn't understand the problem at hand (me) looks at what people are doing (webdevs) and goes "what is going on"
but i have lived through countless webdevs complaining about the "mysterious asset pipeline" breaking again and all i can think of is "we have reinvented C++ but with a whole different class of format string like issues" when i see what absolute torment passes for a build process
we have learned nothing from automake and autoconf, nothing
Jaime Rodaslook i know there's reasons behind "we bundle the entire thing up only then to split it back out into pieces, automatically" but
so much of web dev feels like "complex ways to do what you did before for no meaningful benefit other than the satisfaction of solving a harder problem than you needed to"
at some point you have to ask why there are webapps that send over a docker container's worth of code to insert html into a web page, where the html is rendered server side for speed, of course
i am not saying things used to be better i am saying we're repeating our old mistakes, but the landing pages do look much nicer though, sure
look you will get to an age after suffering through some of the worst internal tools known to mankind, ones that make salesforce seem friendly and slick, and you will hear some dev talking about "flimshaking the respirator in order to re-goo the cookies" and your cookies have never needed re-gooing and you're kinda wondering what the hell people are doing to get into that kinda mess to begin with
also i cannot get over that a lot of these approaches come from performance reasons
it's like "why are you hydrating the dom through batched async requests to the server side rendering cache" "ah it would be slow otherwise "
"why's it slow" "well, in order to hydrate the dom via async requests we're sending over about 20 megs of compressed javascript"
to be clear i do think the move to components, immediate mode style rendering, and addressable application state has been an all round improvement to the process of writing what is normally hairy ui code
but at the same time i can't say the build and release process has made any steps forward
like, wasn't the promise of spdy, http2 and 3 was that things like "head of line blocking pipelined downloads" wouldn't be an issue and "loading five files vs loading one big one" wouldn't matter
Jan Lehnardt 
@tef in practice this turns out to not scale very far and definitely not a lot further than the state this was trying to solve.
⌈Tautology⌋@tef fionna: tef i'm so glad yr over there and not over here cos you don't have to suffer the pizza hut website frontend
cos it's
it's what yr saying but worse
@tef hope you never come across CSS-in-JS. Oops.
Liminal witch 🧙♀️ Sarah@janl much like many frameworks for sql, css frameworks are often written by people who hate writing in the domain language, and so you end up with a weird dsl on top
or sometimes it just feels like class="a b c" and overrides in style="" is considered heresey or deep magic
jordan@tef I still mostly believe that this is the best type of website: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Jokes aside, I hate most javascript web "apps". If I wanted an application, I'd download one. 
Jak2k 🏳️🌈
ani betts@tef I mean I would argue, that the idea is to make it so that "writing client-focused code" shouldn't be so different than "writing server-generated code", making it so wherever it runs, it Mostly Looks The Same is Cool. Means components can work in either place, without having to rewrite it all, whereas in the Traditional Way, moving a server-side focused page to be client-side focused is a complete rewrite
Also, being able to write code that's really localized, where the logic, structure, and style, are all in one place, then let the computer make that as performance efficient as jamming your entire app into one CSS file, is Cool!
Even if there are a lot of ugliness in the details right now, I still believe in The Dream™️
Mark Pauley@anizocani @tef in my experience, the worst thing you can do with computers is to try and make two things look like they are the same when in fact they are fundamentally not the same.
rablewis@anizocani i'm old enough that the "traditional way" used to be progressive enhancement but yeah i hear you
Paul Shryock@tef I want to boost this toot like 10 times.
tmaher
Dennis Clark
count
CatMom916@tef All I know is that AAA Club Alliance is starting to use Salesforce. The dispatch department started using it. And it's a s#it-show. Wait times have increased from 1-2 hours to 5-6 hours for a tow in a populated area. The drivers don't have a good way to communicate with the dispatchers. And now us call takers are starting to use it. But the training is sub-par and we are given no time to practice using it. It's a nightmare. I don't get how Salesforce is supposed to make our lives easier--it's made them harder.
Cassandrich@tef They look so, soooo much worse.
William O'Connell@tef I think build tooling has gotten too complex. But I also think it's easy to forget how different our expectations for the web are now vs in 2006. Websites do way more, and they do it on many different kinds of devices, input methods, networks, etc. Some of the complexity comes from people using Facebook-level tools when they don't have Facebook-level problems. But they do have bigger-than-in-2006 problems.
Cameron Purdy@tef This is so true.
It should be taught in schools, but then no one would ever study computer science.
mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)@tef this was our experience looking into the existence of stuff like JWTs: "wow! this solves a problem that i only have because i chose to use this solution"
Konnor Rogers
Dragon-sided D@tef The best websites return text/ascii documents