Julia EvansDec 19, 2024

I don't know if it's possible to get a good answer to this but: if you learned how to make websites with, like, users who can login and do things where the website stores stuff in a database, without doing it as a job, how did you do it?

I feel like in principle I know all of the basic pieces (HTTP, HTML, CSS, SQL, CORS, various programming languages, etc), but also somehow it still feels extremely hard to me

(no more replies please there are enough)

Show threadJan Lehnardt Dec 19, 2024
@b0rk from online tutorials and the php documentation in ~2000.
Show threadBen RamseyDec 20, 2024

@janl @b0rk I sometimes think if I were starting out now, it might be much more difficult.

Back in the day, it was easy-peasy: shared hosting with PHP, database, and FTP access. I’d just upload files, see what worked and what broke, rinse, repeat.

Show threadJulia EvansDec 20, 2024

@ramsey @janl i'm not sure I'll ever understand the "it was so easy to develop with PHP + FTP" thing, it kind of feels like you had to be there

(it sounds hard to me, like developing with no version control?? no push to deploy? no local dev environment?)

Show threadWez Furlong Dec 20, 2024
@b0rk (I also learned this around the same time as @ramsey and @janl) it was easy in the sense that you just edited a file and copied it up (or edited live on the box!). You didn't *have* to think about version control or push practices because the discipline was in its infancy and those things were not super common. It would have been more difficult to do those best practices because they were not common.
Show threadWez Furlong Dec 20, 2024
@b0rk @ramsey @janl it was easier then also because it was essentially just simple HTML, maybe a dash of CSS and only if you were fancy, some JS. All those things were smaller in scope than today. On the server side it was just PHP and some kind of SQL database. All so much more grokkable than the fullest of the full stacks that folks deal with today. I think that modern webdev is dizzying in its complexity; it's very intimidating compared to what it once was. Much harder to get started today!
Show threadBen RamseyDec 20, 2024
@wez @janl I'm in the same boat. Even as someone who's been doing this over 25 years, I'm intimidated by the level of complexity. I've adapted to it, of course, but I try to stay away from front-end as much as possible 😅, and I know some of it is for the better: things that @b0rk mentioned, like VCS, deployment practices, local dev, etc., I take these for granted now, but none of these were well-established when I was starting out.
Show threadNick Sloan

@ramsey @wez @janl @b0rk It is impossible to overstate the extent to which today’s common web stacks are designed for solving Facebook and Google’s problems. Everything is so complex in part because the tools have been architected for a scale and context that is irrelevant to nearly every project that uses them.

We’re all subsidizing the biggest companies in the world.

Dec 21, 2024 at 12:28amWeb
Show threadEvert PotDec 21, 2024
@nick @ramsey @wez @janl I picked the stack for my current startup and doing things the reasonable way (introduce complexity as needed, multi-page app) it's great and we're productive but we're hiring senior devs and they only know react and react-likes. Theres a risk in doing things this way because it's no longer mainstream and that blows my mind.