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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The startup industry expects employees to be passionate about the banal. This is not realistic.

About you:

You have a passion for CRUD apps. You dream about CRUD in your sleep.

You attend (or give talks at!) CRUD conferences. Your bookshelf has at least five books on CRUD. You attend CRUDathons, and maybe have won first place in the most READs or most CREATEs category.

CRUD is a "hard problem". There are currently no RAD frameworks for simple CRUD apps — nothing like FoxPro or FileMaker of their heyday. The amounts of redundant labor being put in CRUD apps all over the world is insane — and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

So yes, I am mildly passionate about CRUD apps development, and it is not hard to imagine someone who is really passionate about it, coding next-gen rapid development environment for CRUD webapps weekend after weekend, and on its way to becoming yet another garden variety tech billionaire.

If some industry is "boring" and monotonous, it is ripe for disruption by something exciting. Truck driving. Filing taxes. Accounting. Paralegal. And yes, CRUD app development — will be automated nearly out of existence soon.

There are such systems.[1] The first one is very old - it was Viamall, which became Yahoo Store. That was the first system that let you build a complex web page remotely from a browser. Shopping cart, checkout, and payments were all included. It was written in LISP.

[1] https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/ecommerce

Agree with you here that CRUD is a surprisingly hard problem. I've been playing around with Rails however and find it really helps with getting past CRUD.

Rails tends to deal with CRUD not by raising the level of abstraction, but by automating the generation of code. That helps when every different CRUD route grows little hairs of difference, but is less than ideal if you have bigger refactorings to make.

made my day :)

Yes I see adds for startups wanting developers like "we're disrupting the plumbing business we need a developer that is prepared to sleep and eat 80 hour weeks for equity" and I think pass, who'd do that? There are very few startups I see that are doing something interesting, just CRUD business apps in some business vertical market

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