Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I am still using the WordPress installation I set up around 2011/12. Complete with custom styles that are messy balls of entwined PHP and HTML crudely hacked on top of existing styles.

It does what I need it to: sits there quietly and builds the HTML for my blog entries and my slowly-growing art gallery and my ongoing comics projects. It is not sexy. It does not check any boxes that will get me a job at a startup. It just sits there and does what I need it to do; I dive into html/php/css about once every year, at best, to do a quick hack to properly display my latest art project, or to improve and polish that quick hack to really nicely present my work.

I doubt I could get a job at a Silicon Valley unicorn with these skills. But that's fine. I get other work with the skills that my basic web design skills help me show off.

I look at the never-ending cycle of Hot Frameworks and the thought of trying to get on that train makes me feel immensely tired. That's two full-time jobs right there just to be able to check the box on an application asking for six years experience with a hot new framework that came out two years ago.

All these frameworks, all these technologies, all these lengthy toolchains, I don't need any of these to do what the Web was invented for: put some text and images online where people can see it.

Its funny, I'm just setting up Docusign right now, and it bears many of the signs of SPA-done-poorly, even in the most basic, constantly used parts of the UI.

For example:

1) Sign in and open the page showing templates, and my existing template is not displayed - just a whirring hourglass while some Ajax struggles behind the scenes. Clicking to deleted templates, then back again, fixes it.

2) Click to use the template, and I see no indication that anything is happening - then some seconds later a new page appears.

3) Even when opening a support page, the page doesn't render immediately, like a normal web page. Instead the outside of the page loads, then I need to wait while some Ajax chicanery needs to now load the content itself.

There are obviously plenty of people who can build SPAs well, but there are also plenty of people who have SPA fever, and don't ask themselves the basics first - like why don't I just make this a plain old web page?

Hey there, I am a product manager at DocuSign. Sorry about your experience. I would love to dig into this - can you drop me a note at bilal dot aslam at docusign.com? Thank you!

Sure thing, will do.

Remember to turn off your Adblock ;)

> It does what I need it to: sits there quietly and builds the HTML for my blog entries and my slowly-growing art gallery and my ongoing comics projects.

I actually felt that (not Wordpress, but a similar CMS) to be going too far. I got fed up of having to patch PHP security vulnerabilities; debug occasional database outages; etc. just for some occasionally-updated content.

Now I just write markdown, convert it to HTML with pandoc and run a bare bones static file server.

> the never-ending cycle of Hot Frameworks

React has been out for 5 years and it's popularity is only growing. It sticks. Alternatives aren't anywhere close, and the ones that do are just variations on the same pattern. We've learned something real.

Out of curiosity: With all your custom hacks... is it still up to date? One of the biggest things that scares me about widely used web platforms is that they have widely known vulnerabilities. I tend to prefer a bit more home-spun code when I can manage it.

The only custom hacks are my own styles. Every so often it sends me an email saying "hey I just auto-updated to the new stable release". It's great.

and yes I have taken basic security measures to close off a lot of stuff, I dunno if it'd survive an attacker who specifically had it in for me but WP + a decent security plugin does fine.

Same here, my web site went through manually edited HTML in the mid-90s with frames (I know...), XML with XSTL transforms, and now the same XML having those transforms replaced by PHP, it isn't great but does its job.

At work, it is JEE and ASP.NET with server side rendering and vanilaJS.

Some projects do use Angular or VueJS, but only if they are actually a proper SPA.

> I don't need any of these to do what the Web was invented for: put some text and images online where people can see it.

The world changes. Most inventions are used in ways that their inventors never fathomed. While it can be difficult at times, and things can certainly be repurposed or reimagined poorly, overall I think it is a very good thing. How else could innovation and technological advancement occur?

We should try to make the most of these changes, and improve their shortcomings where possible. Or maybe even create something new if there is an opportunity :)

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