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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

This makes me feel old.

IM amused by some of the JS community acting like server side rendering and hydration is akin to discovering fire when they just brought back progressive enhancement from circa 2009.

Next week we're going to have a lesson on semaphores.

On a more serious note, there are a lot of places where we could take some lessons from the past to heart. (read stop reinventing the wheel). Permissions systems spring to mind... Something unix/ldap like would fit a lot of use cases and be much more clear that some of the awful things I have seen. Good database design needs to make a come back (and people need to stop being afraid of sql). Being able to let go of data, why do some people have so much trouble purging old logs.

I could go on but... dam you kids get off my lawn!

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Absolutely spot-on regarding the cyclical nature of server-side techniques. These were once the backbone of high-performance web hosting and architecture. Remember Steve Souders’ “High Performance Websites”? It feels like a prophetic read today as it delved deep into what’s now being rediscovered.

Full stack development has indeed morphed into a daunting field. The complexity has soared with numerous frameworks and PaaS solutions, which, while they offer a lot for “free,” tend to obscure the foundational principles that once were essential knowledge. This shift might not be detrimental as it allows developers to specialize or concentrate on business logic. However, it does make it challenging for small teams or solo developers to build high-performance applications due to the breadth of skills required.

This democratization of technology might make the field more accessible, lowering the barriers to entry for newcomers. While some might view this perspective as elitist, I think it’s just being realistic about the skills and knowledge that defined a ‘good’ developer in the early 2000s compared to today.

I’m nostalgic for the 2000-2010 era too, not just for the technologies and paradigms we used, but for the spirit of exploration and understanding that pervaded our approaches to problems.

The good thing about all this is that a lot of things also combined into single languages and that you can still spool up everything you need to run on a cheap VPS or even a small computer at home.

Need to build a backend? JavaScript and NodeJS. Need to query a database or store data? JavaScript and an ORM of your choice. Need to build a frontend? JavaScript and a frontend library of your choice.

My point is the only thing you actually need to know is a single language and you can build anything you want. This extends to PHP with Laravel, C# and Python as well. Getting into developing things got a lot easier because you don‘t need to get into the nitty gritty of how a web or database server functions.

Obviously there‘s stuff like CI/CD, logging and error tracking that‘s a lot harder to do without PaaS solutions, not to speak of scalability. But these are things that should be left to the professionals, which should absolutely learn about the core concepts of the software they‘re building and deploying. But that’s what they‘re (read: we’re) being paid for.

Nah man, half the jobs in tech exist because someone decided do reinvent the wheel and learn everything from scratch again, we need the jobs!

One of the things I really need to sort on csvbase is permissions. Currently it has something very basic: you own your table and it's either public (meaning everyone has read) or private (meaning only you have read).

I really don't want to implement, eg RBAC, by myself but equally the state-of-the-art seems to be integration against pretty complicated external stuff (/cloud services) which is also undesirable when it's your side-project.

Advice appreciated. I suspect LDAP is not a fit but I will investigate it...

Funny where talking about this: I have spent the last two weeks deep into Postgres roles. The whole system is, to say the least, convoluted. I think I need to write "Postgres roles for dummies"... because I feel like one.

Ldap would be a great fit. And go go read here: https://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/ if you want a dive that you can wrap your head around.

Candidly I would NOT go for ldap or RBAC now. The two things I would try to bite off are shared ownership, and then revokable tokens at the table level. It's up to the token creator what permissions to give them (read/write), how long they should last, and if they want to just publish them or create one per "user".

You probably want to grant full rights to an outside authentication/authorization service that handles the fine grained rights for private tables.

That way you don’t lock the main functionality up with the rights management aspect and 1,000+ custom permissions and role sets.

Authorization is the front door to a hallway with keyed doors behind. Have a peep hole to authenticate where necessary, but don’t complicate the core product with it.

Heck, roll your own version if you have time. With this system you can change it in and out and not have to rewrite your base to accommodate. An oversimplification, as are most things.

My .02c

Heh, I suspect you are on the right path:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054085

Server-side rendering! You mean CGI written in Perl spitting out fully-formed HTML in 1994?

csvbase is written in Python instead of Perl and FCGI instead of "trad" CGI but otherwise is a lot like a site from 1994...

Did you mean serverless?

You mean JCL?

>server side rendering and hydration is akin to discovering fire when they just brought back progressive enhancement from circa 2009.

Active Server Pages and PHP from the mid-90's enter the chat...

My favorite is "static site generation" as if that is new. There were complex perl and bash scripts that generated full sites with templates in the 90's as well. I wrote one in C back then just for fun!

> Good database design needs to make a come back (and people need to stop being afraid of sql)

Aye - folks should learn third normal form. They should learn SQL as well.

There is something weirdly naive and arrogant about the way this works.

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