Hacker News Reader

Comment by LaundroMat | Hacker News Reader

What medium are you expressing your creative and problem-solving urges through now?

I guess I meant it in a kind of half poetic sense. I would like to write, or maybe do some kind of digital or video art.

I got into web dev around 98-99 and i've been doing it ever since.

I think what appealed to me about it about the time was the immediacy of it, being able to write these little js widgets and see them in action instantly. Trying to build these intricate table layouts to replicate the offline versions of various websites that came on a disc with internet magazines.

But the field has changed a lot over the years, first it was the iPhone and mobile-web, CSS animations, SVG, Canvas, Node JS, with JS on a server, React, Redux, State management, and now CI and DevOps, Unit tests, TS, - and the endless deprecations and changes that seem to occur faster than I can keep up with.

The things I used to enjoy are only a fraction of my job, and even those parts have become kind of complex - at least for me. I feel like, as others have said, front end is quite messy and the result of that is that I never feel satisfied that I can complete something and just "Get it right". Seems like the edge-cases are infinite, devices, displays, and other weird quirks...

- sorry for the rant.

Same here, what I loved about the web was the immediacy. You edited 2-3 files and you were done!

Today I had to work with Angular, this thing is insane. So many files, so many layers, so slow... This thing makes me hate what I do.

I wish web dev took a different direction towards more simplicity.

I asked because I'm partly in the same situation. I don't write code for work, but have (and had) too many side projects running. The fun is always at the start: thinking of something, sometimes discussing with potential users and being able to see things realized pretty quickly. But then the complexity kicks in indeed, and the fun turns into a drag.

(I've never been able to monetize anything for more than a few bucks a month, simply because I like to spend more time on creating something new than growing what I have)

Your initial comment made me realize I'm perhaps more interested in creating things that do not solve a problem (like my side projects do), but that express an idea instead.

I'll try and consider my knowledge of coding (Python and web front end) as an extra tool for expressing ideas, next to writing and talking.

Thanks for inciting this train of thought within me :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com