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Comment by lovasoa | Hacker News Reader

I have been thinking about that a lot recently. Where I work, we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business. Maybe we are doing something very wrong, but I am under the impression that most of the code that gets written anywhere is extremely low-entropy.

This low-entropy, repetitive coding is not limited to the user interfaces. We do tend to describe the same structures and logic over and over again in front-ends, backends, and databases.

I am currently building an open-source project that tries to make the definition of applications from database structure to business logic to user interfaces, much more declarative and compact. If you are interested, you can try it on https://sql.ophir.dev

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> we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business.

I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-beautification projects rather than delivering value to the customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but actually do the former.

If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever get fixed. That's the only sucky part.

"Code beautification" is not the point, but a tool. Smaller and clearer code could be faster to write, and harder to make mistakes using. This is why e.g. Rails can be so good at producing certain kinds of apps very quickly and in very few LOCs.

The problem is, of course, that simplicity follows complexity, not the other way around. Because of that, it's mostly "trivial" and "repetitive" tasks that receive polished tools for easy and compact expression. Anything new and non-trivial usually grows ugly and uncouth for quite some time.

Code Beautification is a waste of time and ossifies a code base. It's a form of optimization that actually makes the code harder to change and the business less agile. It is pretty though.

Beauty for the beauty's sake is art, not business.

Usually simple, lean, and logical is also beautiful; beauty is not a random quality. But sometimes too simple and too lean is not flexible enough; then that's a case of a wrong abstraction, or of premature optimization.

I describe our work as an endless loop of taking data from the screen to the database and back again.

This reminds me of the introductory scene of the amazing game The Stanley Parable:

  Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee #427.
  Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.
  Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order.
  This is what Employee #427 did every day of every month of every year, and although others may have considered it soul rending,
  Stanley relished every moment that the orders came in, as though he had been made exactly for this job.

It was a sobering moment when I realized that accurately described most of my job too.

https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Dialogue#Introduct...

That dialogue is hard to fully appreciate without the audio, and that button didn't work for me, so I'm linking a yt. However, I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't played this game should just go play it, even if you're not especially keen on games. It's absolutely brilliant, and consumed as a played game is absolutely the greatest way to absorb its delightful prodding (or anti-prodding (or anti-anti-prodding)) message.

Even just the free demo! The demo is incredible as a standalone experience, and does not have identical dialogue / experience as the full game. It is in fact a meta-experience of the game.

https://youtu.be/YzytQUZx4FU?feature=shared

> somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever get fixed

Value, or short-term value? When the codebase gets hard to manage, the value is there.

I generally try to steer any team I work on away from short-term value. It's an addictive drug to managers that eventually gets used up.

My email signature sometimes says "software done right is always solving novel problems." I wish people always had the time and mandate to find the simple generization of their sequence of one offs.

Hopefully this sounds like helpful feedback instead of annoying nitpicking: I found that the substantial "flash of unstyled content" when the page first loads to be very jarring/unappetizing. I think it would be worthwhile to investigate one of the approaches that can mitigate this FOUC effect.

Cheers and good luck!!!

thanks for the feedback ! I cannot replicate that on my computer with any browser, and all seems normal to google pagespeed insights as well: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-sql-ophir-dev/4o7q6...

Which browser/device are you using, and from where ?

Disable the cache in dev-tools, you can't miss it.

It would be great if someone could open a github issue with reproduction steps and maybe a screenshot: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues

The worst I'm able to get when manually disabling the cache and simulating a slow 3G connection is this: a blank page first, then text in the browser's font, then the text re-renders with the right font, then the icons load. The user should never see completely unstyled content.

The site uses "font-display: fallback" so this happens only on slow network connections. If the font loads fast enough, then the fallback never appears.

The browsers font switching to the right font is exactly what we are talking about. I’m in the Netherlands, so maybe I am just far away from your servers, but there’s about 200-300ms (essentially when reading the title, at least that is what I was doing when it switched on me) and that’s when it switches the font.

You can probably just use the system font for the title, and nobody would ever notice the issue.

Your company is doing something very wrong, but so are the vast majority of software orgs, including mine. Which maybe casts new light on the OP

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