Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by umaar | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

umaar

Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when ultimately, the user just doesn't care.

TypeScript vs. plain JS

Logic-less templates like Mustache vs. Handlebars

Vue vs. React

Using async/await, and adding the relevant infrastructure to support that (transpiler)

Clean code practices in general

Unit tests, end to end tests

CSS BEM vs. tailwind

You can make indirect connections to imply the user does care, e.g. E2E tests catch a bug which meant the user didn't see it, but generally, these things are meaningless to them.

For my first course, I put time into those things - time taken away from making content. The more I think about it for my new course, the more I wonder should I just sell on a platform which already handles all of that, like gumroad.

Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?

View on HN

Yeah that is what it boils down to often; the user doesn't care. It's more about what's best for the developer.

The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just for the sake of looking attractive.

And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it and do not want to work with it".

Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools and doing 'go build').

Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug reports and change requests, instead of new features.

Source: I've seen this happen a number of times.

Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly 200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5 years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that will work alongside or to replace me.

But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may change, idk.

Another factor here is employability. Employers go with the latest fad framework because they think it'll improve their ability to hire engineers in the short term. Unfortunately, this means that web developers need to always know the latest fad framework, whether they like it or not, or they won't get interviews let alone job offers.

> Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when ultimately, the user just doesn't care.

All those things you mention don't affect the user's first experience on your site, you're right: you can use plain JS, ignore clean code practices, have no unit tests, and use the frameworks you're most familiar with even though they don't quite fit, and still start a successful service.

However, they all come into play when you start to evolve your website or service. TypeScript makes it easier to refactor your code when it gets complicated. async/await lets you serve more users. Clean code practices lets you onboard more developers easier. Unit tests and end-to-end tests mean you can iterate more quickly without worrying about breaking existing functionality — something users definitely do care about — which makes it something you should care about too, if you want to keep them around.

> Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?

Gumroad is going to handle payments for you.

You mentioned a course. If you plan to offer video streaming, you'd have to come up with something to provide that platform.

There's places like Teachable and Thinkific for that. That's what I did initially and now years later I want to build my own platform because there's a massive laundry list of things that I don't like about those existing platforms.

But now it's difficult to move an audience from platform A to B because they expect a working and fairly feature rich solution since that's what they are used to. It means the custom solution needs to be shipped as something more than an MVP, which makes it take longer to develop. At the same time, like you said, building the platform takes away from creating the content.

If I could go back in the time I would have built my own platform first while testing the demand with free videos on Youtube.

Hey this is really helpful thanks, very interesting to know you would've built your own platform.

Fortunately I already have my own platform for my first course, so maybe reusing that would be best rather than assuming the grass is greener, with things like gumroad/teachable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com