soulchild77

Like writing prompts will never have the fidelity of directly writing code? :)

My son (13) does some pretty advanced stuff with Scratch which often leaves me speechless:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1374719935

He started using it when he was 9 and hasn't complained about it being too limited yet.

On the contrary: Whenever I show him environments like Godot or GameMaker he's instantly repelled by how complex everything is. I guess there's nothing quite like Scratch because it's easy yet powerful enough and everything is built-in (code editor, graphics editor, audio editor).

This is comparing apples and powertools. ;-)

Despite now having all these tools, a carpenter still needs a lot of skill to create something. If you hand me all the modern tools in existence, I'll probably still cut off both my thumbs and end up with a chair which breaks the moment I try to sit on it.

LLMs allow any person with no skills whatsoever to create almost anything they want. Quality is often good enough or doesn't matter at all. There's no skill needed because Claude will happily tell the person what they are missing and do it for them in the same step.

I totally feel what's expressed in the article: I've been in web development for 25 years now and I have never been this depressed in my life, because AI took most of what I cared for in my job and left me staring into a bleak future of becoming unemployed or pivoting into something I'm gonna hate doing for the rest of my life.

I asked Claude whether these elaborate words like "walk down the design tree" actually mean anything to the LLM and make a difference. The answer confirmed my gut feeling: You can just tell me to "be critical" and get mostly the same results. Matt did incredible work teaching people TS, but this feels more like trying to create FOMO to sell snake oil and AI courses.

Awesome! Too bad Next.js will never profit from these incredible community efforts, because Vercel suffers from NIH.

I felt the same and I asked Claude about it. The answer made me chuckle:

> There’s definitely a tendency to dress up fairly straightforward concepts in academic-sounding language. “Agentic” is basically “it runs in a loop and decides what to do next.” Sliding window is just “we only look at the last N tokens.” RAG is “we search for stuff and paste it into the prompt.” [...] When you’re trying to differentiate your startup or justify your research budget, “agentic orchestration layer” lands differently than “a script that calls Claude in a loop.“

That Oasis tune in the 2nd trailer already ruined everything for me.

This very recent PR updates the docs to basically remove all common (and previously recommended) middleware use-cases, rendering them almost completely useless:

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/pull/77438

After 25 years of professional development experience my favorite task lists are still and will always be paper and pencil. ;-)

Although it became harder in recent years to find recommendations for newer businesses, Foursquare has always been way more reliable for me than Google Maps reviews (where almost everything has at least 4 stars). Hopefully, they're just reintegrating everything into Swarm.

This. I think types really make the difference here. You can get very far with just plain old JS objects as long as you've got strong types in place.

Never, when it felt right. I'm in my mid fourties now, still doing web development and I stayed 13 years at a startup and am now celebrating 10 years at my current employer. In between I joined a somewhat well-known (prestigious) company which had a very toxic work culture, so it was a no-brainer to leave after just 1,5 years. Management was clueless, most people were awkward all the time, pay was very good, but I just couldn't stand going to work.

If the company values your work (not just by giving you an appropriate salary, but also acknowledging that you're a valuable asset and not just arbitrarily replaceable), gives you enough freedom and your colleagues are cooperative and nice to work with, why leave? You probably wouldn't leave your partner just because you've been together for a too long time, would you? ;-)

Fat as in fat models, thin controllers ;-)

What exactly makes Go more suitable for building LDAP clients than any other language, including JS? I've been running ldapjs in production for 4 years now (it's basically a web-based LDAP frontend) and it's been rock-solid.

In cases where the client needs to stay separate, we have had a good experience with Orval[1] to generate a fully-typed @tanstack/query client from our OpenAPI spec.

[1] https://orval.dev/

That's actually something I find a bit awkward, too. Especially, there was no way to re-use the global Hono error handler for all OpenAPI routes. I created an issue[1] with my suggested workaround and was told that that's the way to go. Maybe things are that way because `zod-openapi` was introduced later on. But I believe in the end it doesn't really matter that much as the code is clean and readable. :)

[1] https://github.com/honojs/middleware/issues/323#issuecomment...

I created a pet project (REST API) with Hono and I'm seriously considering using it for future projects instead of what has been my go-to stack for years (Express, lately with Zodios).

Hono's middlewares, especially zod-openapi[1] and @scalar/hono-api-reference[2], make it really easy to define your REST endpoints once and get full typesafe routes with request/response validation, an automatic OpenAPI spec, a beautiful OpenAPI browser and you can even reuse the typings in your frontend with Hono's RPC[3] middleware, essentially giving you end-to-end type-safety without any code-generation.

Its maintainer yusukebe is a really nice guy who is always being helpful and very active. I want Hono to become the modern successor of Express. :)

[1] https://hono.dev/snippets/zod-openapi

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@scalar/hono-api-reference

[3] https://hono.dev/guides/rpc

This has been my experience as well. I introduced my son to Scratch when he was 8 and now, 2 years later, he's creating quite advanced games in it I wouldn't have thought possible.

But whenever I show him "real" programming languages, he's like: I can do all of that with Scratch as well - without having to type all that stuff.

We tried GameMaker and produced some cool results together, but as soon as I turn around, he's back at his Scratch projects.

Sometimes I wonder if it'd have been better had he started with code right away. Like I did back in the days. ;-)

IMHO, blaming the unexperienced Javascript developers is unfair, because in my experience mostly the senior Java developers were the ones jumping on the hypercomplexity infrastructure bandwagon and embracing microservices as the logical next step after wrapping design patterns with design patterns in their code bases.

react-query indeed doesn't automatically take care of this. We manually invalidate its caches (based on the query key, so you only ever invalidate what has changed) after a mutation happens. It's not as bad as it sounds because most of the time it's just one line of code.

We're happy users of react-query[1]. Its stale-while-revalidate approach makes Redux and Co. unneccessary for most use-cases.

If you have an OpenAPI spec of your REST API you can auto-generate a react-query based frontend client with Orval[2]. Works pretty well, but probably takes a bit more time to set up.

[1] https://tanstack.com/query/v4/ [2] https://orval.dev/

Did it ever cross your mind that there are more things than money which make a person stay at a company for a longer period?

For me personally, if the money is enough for me to make a comfortable life with my family, other things at work become important. I could never spend most of my days with assholes or do idiotic work even if the pay was way above market value, for instance. I'd also trade money for more free-time, if possible.

And yes, the company I work at does feel like a family. But nobody had to tell me this. It just does so, naturally.

I wrote a Sketch plugin[1] to search and insert SVG logos.

[1] https://github.com/soulchild/sketch-logo-fetcher

Hehe, sometimes Hacker News is unbelievable. ;-) So, I take it you‘re from the Cologne area as well, given the Burning Chrome‘s proximity to the city (if memory serves) and long-distance calls were outrageously expensive.

Funny, a guy called Scythe, operating a board called Burning Chrome was a member of my group (Paranoia). We mainly developed PCBoard PPEs. Good times indeed! ;-)

Admittedly, I only concentrated on the bad stuff in my post.

Both communities were focused on everyday problems, one dealt with parenting and the other was about cooking (recipes). I wouldn't have stayed for over 10 years with the former if there were never any positive things. It always felt a bit like I was doing something for the greater good (I don't want to sound arrogant here). Seeing how women finally got pregnant after many frustrating months (or even years) with the help of one of our tools (a period tracker) was very rewarding. There were people supporting each other when one of them lost child after child during pregnancy for whatever reasons.

Most of the users that kept complaining about everything were long-time users. Many didn't have anything to do with the main topics of the platform. They just stayed because they liked the community and discussed politics or whatever in one of the sub-forums.

In the end, the company was bought by a large publisher, all the staff (12 people or so) was basically let go (after 10+ years) and nowadays it's an almost unusable user-interface mess with ads in every corner. Oh, and that one specific sub-forum the users used to complain about stuff? Yeah, that was shut down completely to just shut everybody up. What a simple and effective solution for a pesky "problem" ...

To be honest, I never liked the idea of being heavily dependent on advertisement to finance the platform, but sadly that's just the way the Internet works.

After I became a father of two, my priorities shifted towards my family and I'm now more interested in doing something good for and especially WITH my kids instead of working a stressful job.

You missed my point. This is not about the quality of software development. It's about users bitching about everything publically (by posting to the platform's forum) because we changed something on a platform they basically use free of charge (if you can call it that, because it was financed by advertising). They act like they own everything - including me. In the real world this would probably be called antisocial behaviour, but on the Internet people renownedly lose all their good manners.

Regarding bugs: We were a very small team of just 2-3 engineers. One could argue that the business model was just wrong, but if we wanted to hire another 5+ engineers we'd have to dial up the ads like crazy (of course leading to even more user outrage). And back in those days (we're talking 1999-2012 here) our foremost problem wasn't bugs, but keeping up with the ever-rising traffic on a highly dynamic system.

I hear you! Our system is multitenant-capable as well, but we're lucky in that all three tenants are basically run by the same customer.

And yes, having to implement features that are rarely if at all used (and sometimes removed before they ever make it into production) is demoralizing.

I think it all depends on the customer(s) - be they business or consumer.

> Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs

This! I worked for two huge (~60 and ~600 million page impressions per month) online communities for a total of 15 years. The level of stress induced by the users whenever something broke, was changed (even only slightly) or they just had a bad day was horrible and led to all kinds of fuzzy health problems (mainly panic attacks and hypertension). I was very attached to the product and always strived to make the users happy, and that played a big part in the problem.

Making slight changes to the interface oftentimes resulted in users insulting us like we had renovated their living room without permission. Can you imagine what it was like when a bug in Apache's mod_cache suddenly cached session cookies?

I always loved the job, but that made it so hard to draw a line and not letting it get to me.

Afterwards I switched employers and started working on a B2B platform in the banking sector. Of course, the enterprise has a different set of problems (in my case, no clue what the requirements really are), but your corporate users are just used to a different kind of standard (hint: way lower than your average Bootstrap frontend). They pay very good money, let you work on interesting things, technology-wise, and users are mostly easy to satisfy.

Perl gets bashed for all its quirks all the time, although there is a huge amount of tooling to write clean and readable Perl (Perl::Critic, Moose, etc). What really amazes me, is how everybody seems to be cool with using tons of tools to work around the many inherent language deficiencies in Javascript (with Coffeescript being the most insane "solution"), but it's a totally different story when it comes to Perl.