I feel sometimes that we are running in circles in front end development. We had a good thing: Then we burned, step on it, and then recreated it because it was the best way to do things in the end of the day. :(
But it’s not a circle, it’s an arc. If it were a circle, running as fast as you can in one direction would bring you back around to the former. Instead we hit the end of the swing and backpedal until we remember why we were going this direction in the first place.
I feel like this is the inevitability of more and more tooling being released. Eventually there will be so much tooling that its hard to even work effectively as the signal to noise ratio plummets over time.
You should really try something like NextJs, all the nightmarish parts of FE development are abstracted away. It makes me hopeful for a future where all the config files and tools are invisible and you just develop applications. All the TS, HMR, SSR, etc. is invisible to you and managing it is the responsibility of the people developing the frameworks.
front end is such a shit show these days endless and then stuff runs for 1 month stable and instead of adresing real issues they come up with another rewrite.
As a mid-seniority developer, I'm just now starting to grasp the harsh reality of a full refactor. We always think we can improve the speed and code of a website but, man, that's really though.
I always remember the "let's throw away Windows ME codebase for NT" scenario. Sometimes giving up is better I suppose.
Well the Windows 9x codebase was always mean to be , eventually, thrown away. It existed only to be able to run the OS on very low hardware (eg Win95 run even on 4 MB of RAM).
Certain websites are so overbuilt though that theres plenty of low hanging fruit. I’d say a very healthy majority of the websites I visit could replace whatever bulky mess they have with static html and still serve me their content and ads. Then the website would probably be orders of magnitude more performant refactored in html.
One of our teams rewrote their legacy cloud product in an interesting way. Instead of gradually replacing components of the existing product, they forked it, rewrote most stuff from scratch in a different branch using a different stack (different UI/UX also) and called it version 2.0. The old version was still maintained (bugfixes, tech support etc.) but they stopped selling it. Instead, they started selling version 2.0 (new clients were unaware of the difference). Version 2.0 did not have full feature parity with version 1.0 at the start because it would take years to reimplement everything. What they did was gradually migrate clients from 1.0 and 2.0. Most clients did not need all the features so they were OK with version 2.0. Those clients who refused, stayed on version 1.0 for a few years. Then the team was slowly adding more and more features to 2.0 for the next few years, and more and more clients were willing to migrate, and this year the last client migrated to version 2.0. It took 4 years overall. The new version was designed to be more stable, more scalable and more maintainable, so it's a net win in the end. Also, since it was basically a new product, they were able to experiment with new ideas without the constraints of the old product.
There's usually a subset of any given codebase that gets changed substantially on a regular basis, and the rest mostly stays mostly the same. If you can get the parts in the former category replaced with something better to work with, that often gives you most of the advantages and you can migrate any remaining bits as and when you can be bothered.
>We always think we can improve the speed and code of a website
You're not wrong, but the moment you speed up your site to being usable then the stakeholders above you are going to add 50 more (conflicting?) requirements until the site is slow as the old one.
I love the idea of Gemini. But I also find myself forgetting it exists. Maybe the addictive way we do web design this days is the culprit. But, honestly, maybe is just the content quality.
Maybe, once you take out the rose colored glasses, the past internet wasn't so great?
I remember being a kid and having a blast on the 2000's internet, but it was really hard to bump into a really good site. Tbh most of them were kinda crappy.
Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good times, but if I tried to recreate today the same things like I did in the past, I realized that everything changed: Some friends stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And some interests didn't interest me anymore.
I also realized that what I don't really miss the old internet. I miss being a kid, having all the time in the world in my hands, with total freedom to play with the most absurd activities with zero regards about productivity and being amazed with the most simple things.
Quoting one of my favorite HN comments that captures this sentiment really well [1]:
> I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
> I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
That quotation is funny, because the forums I know where people argue about bands (or classical or jazz composers or performers) are largely kept active by users who are already in their late 30s or 40s and up. Passionately arguing about band minutiae requires typing longform text, but younger generations are mainly using their phones where they don't write much longform text, or even don't visit third-party forum websites at all.
I still feel weird about video. Gen Z just confuses me.
Gen Alpha will embrace telepresence. Then Gen Beta will reject the esthetics of disintermediation altogether and only relate face-to-face. Then Gen Gamma will create kinetic visual vocabularies, a synthesis of dance, sign language, and improv.
The pendulum will continue to swing.
Each cohort has their own thing. Different medias aren't better or worse. They're just different.
For the record, my post above made no value judgment about which medias are better or worse or ragged on “kids these days”. I just wanted to emphasize that the forum behavior which the quoted person claims to have aged out of, is actually being kept alive by his very generation.
Forgive my non sequitur. Rereading my words, I don't think I was replying to you or your points. But now I can't tell who (or what) I was responding to. So I'll just blame my pre-senility.
Younger generations are consuming product from a millionaire, and communicating back to them with hearts and cash, as a chat runs along the bottom of the screen.
> I remember being a kid and having a blast on the 2000's internet, but it was really hard to bump into a really good site. Tbh most of them were kinda crappy.
> Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good times, but if I tried to recreate today the same things like I did in the past, I realized that everything changed: Some friends stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And some interests didn't interest me anymore.
I think it runs both a bit deeper and broader than just "what I liked then, I don't like now".
In the 2000s and prior, the promise of everything involved seemed infinite. We looked at some small or bad website and saw the potential for it to become bigger and better. If it can do x, maybe it can do y, z, and more.
Today, we know what the full potential of a website is, and it's not nearly what we thought it was. So when we see a small or bad website now, we know that all it can do is maybe be a little better, but trying to improve it could just as likely make it unwieldy and worse.
In our disillusionment, we try to recapture that awe-inspiring feeling of infinite potential, but instead of making something new that's full of potential we only pantomime what we were doing 20-30 years ago, by forcing arbitrary virtual restraints on ourselves inspired by what were once the limits of our reality. Gemini, Hypercard, virtual game consoles, etc.
At best the result feels as artificial and empty as a more emotionally detached examination of the motivation might've suggested, and upon recognizing that we move on from it. At worst, we recognize how much of that potential wasn't ever realized — and the often arbitrary and cynical reasons why — and feel even sadder, because our memory of that infinite potential is tainted by the reality.
It's like the moonshots of the 60s and 70s leading to people thinking we'd be colonizing the solar system or breaking the speed of light by now.
Just like any limitation, all of these virtual-limitation experiments have some legitimate uses and can inspire creativity. But it's become clear that the people who dove into it for the doomed nostalgic hope of recapturing that feeling of potential have recognized that and moved on, either to newer pastures of actual limitation-breaking potential or other nostalgic boondoggles.
Yup, nostalgia projects often don't work because people don't really want the exact same thing as before, they want something which realises the potential of what there was before.
Good example is the game Minecraft - when it was new, everyone liked it for the sandbox nature and the endless possibilities. Now that most of the creative things in the game are either dead or stagnant, and the developers are actively working against the game's potential, now it feels like a dead end.
It's similar to the web in this regard.
Nostalgia projects should just start from the old principles and build something which is an improvement over the things we had back then and which we have now.
> Today, we know what the full potential of a website is, and it's not nearly what we thought it was.
I mean, people attribute Arab Spring to Twitter (maybe it's even when traditional news outlets started paying attention to social media? I don't remember, exactly), so I'd say the potential of a website is pretty significant, although it really has nothing to do with it being a website. More about being a place for people to communicate.
I still have basically the same rose-colored glasses for the web. Sure, websites are not as exciting as they once seemed, but not much about the web's potential for people to connect has changed, aside from increased awareness by parties who would stand in the way, but in response ways of avoiding their attention have also arisen.
Yeah, same. I think it's just that so much of the Internet comes to you now (via social feeds, emails, or RSS feed), the idea of surfing to find stuff is mostly dead to us. And you have to fire up a different browser to do it? Just too easy to forget.
There will never be a killer app for Gemini, and pretty much anyone who's good enough to be worth following will never fully commit to the protocol.
Although I’m a bit sceptic for LLM for complex programming, I really think this will make some quakes in the music industry. Especially regarding mixing and pop music arrangements.
Maybe we are seeing that, in the end of the day, who was indirectly paying for open source was the government by offering low interest rates so companies could have some space to spare developers?
Why the Open Source is in crisis right now if thats not the case?
