Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackerydev | Hacker News Reader

I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad.

It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.

View on HN

DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.

I am both, I own a small agency when I have to be practical, and have fun crafting code on the hobby side.

I think what craftsmen miss is the different goals. Projects fall on a spectrum from long lived app that constantly evolve with a huge team working on it to not opened again after release. In the latter, like movie or music production (or most video games), only the end result matters, the how is not part of the final product. Working for years with designers and artists really gave me perspective on process vs end result and what matter.

That doesn’t mean the end result is messy or doesn’t have craftsmanship. Like if you call a general contractor or carpenter for a specific stuff, you care that the end result is well made, but if they tell you that they built a whole factory for your little custom made project (the equivalent of a nice codebase), not only it doesn’t matter for you but it’ll be wildly overpriced and delayed. In my agency that means the website is good looking and bug free after being built, no matter how messy is the temporary construction site.

In contrast if you work on a SaaS or a long lived project (e.g. an OS) the factory (the code) is the product.

So to me when people say they are into code craftsmanship I think they mean in reality they are more interested in factory building than end product crafting.

I also do third party software development, and my approach is always: bill (highly, $300+/hr) for the features and requirements, but do the manual refactoring and architecture/performance/detail work on your own time. It benefits you, it benefits the client, it benefits the relationship, and it handles the misunderstanding of your normie clients with regard to what constitutes "working".

Say it takes 2 hours to implement a feature, and another hour making it logically/architecturally correct. You bill $600 and eat $200 for goodwill and your own personal/organizational development. You're still making $200/hr and you never find yourself in meetings with normie clients about why refactoring, cohesiveness, or quality was necessary.

I agree wholeheartedly. As for the why do craftsmen care so much about the factory instead of the product, I believe the answer is pride. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but writing and shipping a hack is sometimes the high road

If you've been doing it for that long (about as long as I have), then surely you remember all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types.

I'm not saying they don't have their place, but without us they would still be making the world go round. Only backwards.

I work in digital forensics and incident response. The “git ‘er done” software engineers have paid my mortgage and are putting my kids through private schooling.

> all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types

It’s lovely to have the time to do that. This time comes once the other type of engineer has shipped the product and turned the money flow on. Both types have their place.

Well, going round in a circle does project to going forwards then backwards in a line :)

I think there's more dimensions that also matter a bunch:

  * a bad craftsman will get pedantic about the wrong things (e.g. SOLID/DRY as dogma) and will create architectures that will make development velocity plummet ("clever" code, deep inheritance chains, "magic" code with lots of reflection etc.)
  * a bad practician will not care about long term maintainability either, or even correctness enough not to introduce a bunch of bad bugs or slop, even worse when they're subtle enough to ship but mess up your schema or something

So you can have both good and bad outcomes with either, just for slightly different reasons (caring about the wrong stuff vs not caring).

I think the sweet spot is to strive for code that is easy to read and understand, easy to change, and easy to eventually replace or throw out. Obviously performant enough but yadda yadda premature optimization, depends on the domain and so on...

After becoming a founder and having to deal with my own code for a decade, I’ve learned a balance. Prototype fast with AI crap to get the insight than write slow with structure for stuff that goes to production. AI does not touch production code - ask when needed to fix a tiny bit, but keep the beast at arms distance.

It takes both.

The HTML generated by Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode might not have been ideal, but it was far superior to the mess produced by MS Front Page. With Dreamweave, it was at least possible to use it as a starting point.

Judicious and careful use of Dreamweaver (its visual editor and properties bar) enabled me to write exactly the code I wanted. I used Dreamweaver foot table layouts and Home Site (later Top Style) for broader code edits. At that time I was famous with the company for being able to make any layout. Good times!

MS FrontPage also went out of its way to do the same.

It might have been pretty horrible but I hold Frontpage 97 with fond memories, it started my IT career, although not for HTML reasons.

The _vti_cnf dir left /etc/passwd downloadable, so I grabbed it from my school website. One Jack the Ripper later and the password was found.

I told the teacher resposible for the IT it was insecure and that ended up getting me some work experience. Ended up working the summer (waiting for my GCSE results) for ICL which immeasurably helped me when it was time to properly start working.

Did think about defacing, often wonder that things could have turned out very much differently!

It’s funny this came up, because it was kinda similar to the whole “AI frauds” thing these days.

I don’t particularly remember why, but “hand writing” fancy HTML and CSS used to be a flex in some circles in the 90s. A bunch of junk and stuff like fixed positioning in the source was the telltale sign they “cheated” with FrontPage or Dreamweaver lol

My only gripe was that they tended to generate gobs of “unsemantic” HTML. You resized a table and expect it to be based on viewport width? No! It’s hardcoded “width: X px” to whatever your size the viewport was set to.

> glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was to web development what ...

I just sat here for 5 minutes and I wasn't able to finish that sentence. So I think that's a statement in itself.

That was my point! Dreamweaver to web dev felt like what LLM's are to many disciplines!

..VB6 was to windows dev?

People with very little competence could and did get things done, but it was a mess underneath.

I love how people speak about Dreamweaver in the past, while Adobe keeps getting money for it,

https://developer.adobe.com/dreamweaver/

And yes, as you can imagine for the kind of comments I do regarding high level productive tooling and languages, I was a big Dreamwever fan back in the 2000's.

I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s!

My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough

Back in the early 00s I brought gvim.exe on a floppy disk to school because I refused to write XSLT, HTML, CSS, etc without auto-indent or syntax highlighting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com