Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    I want to, but I just can't back any claim that 
    things have gotten easier for pretty much anything.

I think it's easier for a seasoned developer to spin up and deploy a "real" Djanjo/Rails/whatever app with decent table-stakes features like secure auth.

But everything else is harder.

I have zero idea how to tell a new developer to get started in the hobby/industry these days.

The real problem IMO is the absolute churning shitstorm that is front-end development. I don't know how it got so bad, so quickly, and stayed that way for so long. We as an industry are not going to be happy until it takes at least 50 toolchain steps to produce a simple "hello world."

Getting a rails app up and running used to be somewhat easy. You did have to ssh into a machine, but that wasn't that complicated, all told. Comparable to standing up a BBS way back in the day. Restated, if you could have a machine that was dedicated to the serving of something, it wasn't that hard back in the day.

To that end, I suspect telling people to just stand up a node server is where to start hobbyists off? Still very complicated with the division between front and backend that is difficult to see for new folks.

And I fully agree on the ridiculous churn. Having zero stability in documentation and how to do things has been terrible for our industry. What we have gained in better ways seems to mostly be lost in all of the previous ways that used to work.

A-fucking-men!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com