Tell HN: The case for CRUD apps in the age of AI
But, people forget that CRUD apps can be as complex or simple as they need to be. A CRUD app is identified as such by its purpose, not the sophistication of it.
Right now I'm wring a web app that's basically manages some domain data in a central db, but guess the kinds of things I have had to deal with. Here a a few (there are many more), in no particular order:
- Caching and load balancing infrastructure.
- Crafting an ORM that handles caching, transactions, and, well, CRUD, but in a consistent, well-typed, and IO-provider-agnostic manner (IO providers could be: DBs like Postgres, S3-compatible object stores, Redis, Sqlite, Localstorage, Filesystems, etc. Yes, I need all those).
- Concurrent user access in manner that is performant and avoids conflicts.
- Db performance for huge datasets (so consideration of indexes, execution plans, performant queries, performant app architecture, etc, etc)
- Defining fluent types for defining the abstract API methods that form the core of the system
- Defining types to provide strong typing for routes that fulfill each abstract API method.
- Defining types to provide strongly-typed client wrappers for each abstract API method
- How to choose the best option for application- and API security (Cookies?, JWT?, API keys? Oauth?)
- Choosing the best UI framework for the requirements of the app. I actually had to write a custom react-like library for this.
- Media storage strategy (what variants of each media to generate on the server, how to generate good storage keys, etc.
- Writing tooling scripts that are sophisticated enough to help me type-check, build, text, and deploy the app just in the way I want
- Figuring out effective UI designs for CRUD pages, with sorting, filtering, paging, etc built in . This is far from simple. For just one example, naive paging is not performant, I need to use keyset pagination.
- Doing all the above with robust, maintainable, and performant code
- Writing effective specs and docs for all my decisions and design for the the above
And many many more! I've been working on this "CRUD" app for years as a greenfield project that will be the flagship product of my startup. The techniques I have to evolve to solve various challenges could easily fill entire books.