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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

As usual to those who are not invested in the ecosystem already it looks so strange to see people popping champagne corks to have back basic development functions we had in 1995.

Are the benefits of things like lambdas really so great that everyone gave up such basic functionality to test and develop your code?

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I'm a heavy user of Lambda. Our primary stack is Heroku+Rails, but one of our workflows allows students to upload DOCX files where we do some heavy processing (2-3 seconds per file). This wasn't a great fit for Rails, fabulous fit for serverless.

And yes, I enormously miss the basic functionality I had in the webdev ecosystem. Developing on Lambda was very difficult by comparison.

Yeah, the is exactly the way we felt. While SST's internals might be complicated, from a user's perspective you get a "normal" local development experience.

I don't work with Lambda regularly, but I think, yes - basically.

That's even more evident for simple stuff that doesn't need debugging on the logic, but benefits from the Lambda features in terms of scaling etc.

Not mentioned is that your unit tests should be getting you most of the way...

If you’re still writing unit tests consider using a strongly typed functional language instead. Typescript will get you most of the way there. At some point you’ll realize all the assertions you’re making are already covered. Integration tests are the only valuable tests in my experience, using something like puppeteer, playwright, or cypress that automatically runs as part of a build pipeline.

Until it breaks in production and I'm deploying new versions to get extra logging added so can I try and work out what's gone wrong.

We personally do, we've been using Lambdas and serverless for the past 4 years. And we've never had to worry about scaling or downtime. We are a small team, so this has a real impact on us.

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