So things like Firebase will become less popular, and more complicated things will become more popular since that offers more progression (‘at least I’ve learned to do harder and harder things’).
There’s a line from Being John Malkovich where the girl he is after tells him the following:
Maxine : Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.
Most of us have no idea what to create with how simple things are.
Will a nice service that offers scalability, auth, user management, real time, etc become popular? Nah. No one has any good ideas on what to do with that.
Will barebones roll your own static site generators and shit become more popular? Yes, for we don’t know what else to do but keep churning the butter.
I have been trying to write a basic webapp that's a duolingo clone for piano chords on and off for years. Every single time I try it ends up falling apart because there is so many things to tie together.
I started with plain html, css, js. It quickly grew to the point where every change was breaking something else. Clearly I need to test so I try to learn to how test web code. Documentation and forums everywhere only help with testing assuming you're using a framework. I get busy with my dayjob again and don't pick this up for another few months
Screw this, I really liked the rails tutorial by michael hartl I completed in 2013 I'll give that method a shot. Turns out nothing from 2013 is relevant anymore. Server side rendering for a dynamic front end is confusing as hell. I have similar problem trying Django. Keep in mind every place I look for help react and various js backends are being shoved down my throat. I get busy with my dayjob again and don't pick this up for another few months
Ok fuck this I'll just bite the bullet and learn react and backend js. Now I'm in webpack hell. every problem is solved by making further complicated changes to babbel and sucking in 100 more js dependencies. I still don't have a SQL database integrated, authentication, a front end or tests and I'm miserably confused. I get busy with my dayjob again and don't pick this up for another few months
Time to give asp .net core a try. Holy shit one command gives me an entire hostable front end and backend with authentication. I'm so close. Oop nevermind there's so much black magic in this sample app I have no idea how to start associating my database schema with the logged in user. The sample does so much for me, I barely understand how to extend it. I get busy with my dayjob again and don't pick this up for another few months
Finally I just accept that it's all too complicated and try to integrate a react front end with firebase. I'm still struggling with so many issues but I've never gotten this far before. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I get busy with my dayjob again and don't pick this up for another few months
There isn't a single tutorial/documentation/sample that I can find that uses a database outside of sqlite, a backend, a front end, authentication, unit/integration tests, and how to host it all. As soon as I get two or three of them together it becomes such a mess that I can't complete the rest. This is the bare minimum for a webapp. Everybody expects to be able to login and view/modify/add their data. Every developer expects to be able to make a change, run some tests and push to production.
I don't think I'm incompetent. Given enough time an energy I could get any of my above attempts to work. But I have a dayjob and a social life and want to have a bit fun toiling around with a website on the side. A webapp is not very simple. If it is then prove it. Show me your codebase and explain it to me. My email is in my bio. Or at least link to someone that has
You can do a lot in just one file. Don’t try to grok these stacks. Make one Node.js Express server, and write all your routes in one file. Then send down one index.html file with one js/css, and write everything there. Start with just three files.
Look, I’m not saying industrial level frontend isn’t needlessly complicated. Don’t go down the path of learning a stack until you can build a functioning app with nothing at all.
I don’t know Haskell, but I have a pretty good idea of what the person is doing, all in one file. When you take up a whole stack, then you have to figure out how all the legos connect. I wouldn’t bother with that initially.
You have enough experience to already know that the holy grail to all of this is getting to the point where you can say no to 70% of what the stack offers. Even better if you can get to a point where you can say no to what people say you need to use in our current time (all the frontend stuff from 2013 is still totally fine for building a non trivial app in 2021).