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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Eh. I think that is pretty weak. 99.99% of that list is infra stuff, not directly related to backend developmnent.

Assuming your infra already worked for you and you were wring Java + Spring at most you might have migrated to Kotlin + Spring Boot.

If your infra wasn't working for you already you might be using k8s + jib, the end.

So churn has a lot to do with eco-system you are in and it's individual tolerance for churn. JVM, especially Java has very minimal tolerance and won't move unless something is very clearly objectively better in some way or the existing solution is being deprecated.

Infra has seen a larger push than usual this time with the containers/k8s/service-mesh push but it's not that unusual for infra to see large upheavals every now and then.

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So, we can wave our arms in similar fashion at front end space. This is variant of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Example:

Waves arms all this churn is in the frontend infra space. Assuming your infra already worked for you maybe you’ve gone from JavaScript/React five years ago to writing Typescript/React today.

JavaScript infra has seen larger than usual push around contain^H^H^H^H^H err around “bundling”, but it’s normal to see large upheavals every now and then

The argument is a ton weaker in the frontend space. Even if you got into React early and stayed there there has been numerous upheavals in "the correct way to do react" from class style to functional style and a ton of different ways to do state (redux and friends) etc, hooks, bleh.

It's insanely dishonest to try palm off bundling as infra, it has absolutely nothing to do with infra just like Java build systems have essentially zero to do with infra. All of the churn in Webpack/esbuild/vite/whatever is entirely on the frontend space and they have no one to blame but themselves for the mess they have created.

The proper solutions have been known for a long time but for various political reasons they have remained untenable to implement. Namely NaCL, WASM and friends. Everyone knows JS is a poor language but it's the only available web runtime (hence why we have so much transpilation) but because of the fractured web engine ecosystem and no standards body with backbone it can't be reasonably fixed right now.

Failing that the least the JS community could do would be find a way to work reasonably with real build systems like Bazel, Pants, Buck etc instead of continually trying to poorly implement build systems themselves that just plain suck (looking at you nx).

All these things are a matter of perspective. Look close enough and you will find new ideas (“churn”) happening in every area of programming. What is the difference between Nx vs Nix, Gradle vs Bazel, gRPC vs Twirp, MessagePack vs CBOR, C++ vs Rust, dep vs go mod, ARM vs RISC V? Why is it that Webpack vs Vite is worthy of such frustration compared to any of the above?

Frontend tooling is as much “infra” as Docker is. In fact they’re quite similar, since in both contexts the goal is to ship code to multiple platforms.

No. Backend itself has that same tooling (compiler / build toolchain) and even that isn’t infra.

> ^H^H^H^H^H

Alright, can someone finally explain to me what this is? I see it all the time on HN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^H

> This sequence is still used humorously for epanorthosis by computer literates, denoting the deletion of a pretended blunder, much like a strikethrough; in this case, however, the ^H symbol is faked by typing a regular '^' followed by typing a regular 'H'.

And

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanorthosis

> An epanorthosis is a figure of speech that signifies emphatic word replacement. "Thousands, no, millions!" is a stock example. Epanorthosis as immediate and emphatic self-correction often follows a Freudian slip (either accidental or deliberate).

In terminals, if you type ctrl-h, it backspaces (ctrl-w backspaces a word). Very handy!

Someone needs to set up the infra. Do you, as a backender, let the frontend guys handle it?

In the last years backend basically merged with infra, so it's a reasonable concern.

That's not really true. I'm a SWE and Systems Engineer - it's really, really rare to find anyone that knows anything deep about both. DevOps/SRE may be on the same or adjacent teams as SWEs but they're still operating in loosely coupled domains of their own work and tooling - despite what it may appear from the outside. The exception on either side may be at the Staff+ level, where engineers have grown deeper end to end knowledge that slips into other domains. That said, Staff+ isn't a significant portion of the industry.

I agree with this statement, there is clear delineation between back-end and infra. I imagine because there been significant time to stabalise expections and behavior that the front-end guys haven't had time to develop.

Interesting.

A few days ago I read how DevOps failed because people didn't understand it meant devs should do their own ops, instead they rebranded their ops roles to DevOps and called it a day. Here we are, talking about just that happening.

Anyway, lately I was working with SaaS and serverless systems and had the impression that there wasn't much difference anymore between infra and code. Configuring and deploying an auth service, or a isn't much different from writing code for FaaS and deploying it.

It depends on the scale you're operating at, not to be cliche.

A small service with simple scaling constraints and that's designed intentionally to scale horizontally or vertically can make use of a lot of our the box systems that a single developer or even team of software engineers could wrangle.

If the service needs better security guarantees, scaling triggered by advanced/atypical metrics, or cutting edge performance and tuning then you still need specialized people to realize those systems and maintain them. That's not to underscore how quickly a distributed system starts to get "chatty" and quickly falls into this space.

Really all DevOps fundamentally meant was spreading APIs to all kinds of things in infrastructure that previously did not have APIs. Someone, unfortunately, took the leap that it also meant SWEs could do this now - ignoring huge domains of knowledge about distributed systems scaling, security, and performance that rest within the domain of systems people. In effect, it just meant more systems people need to be coding and doing systems thinking.

99.99%? Did he list at least 10000 items lol

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