Rails 8 made me love Rails again after a few years working with other tools. The new direction is just perfect, specially for solo developers. The 'solid trifecta' in combination with the simplicity of using sqlite3, the new built in auth solution, Kamal... everything, so f*ing good.
I know sqlite3 is great, but I've always found it much more annoying to use it on a server for small side projects than just using Postgres where I could just connect to the prod instance from my local machine and run some queries to look at the data. With sqlite I'd always have to sync files, set up volumes, make sure permissions are correct vs. just setting an environment variable to a PG instance.
From what I understand, the sqlite3 comment was made it context of the Solid libraries. Basically common Redis-backed functionality can now be sqlite3-backed instead.
I do share your preference on using Postgres as the main database. Having that as the main db with sqlite3 used for auxiliary functionality sounds great.
I've been out of rails for more than a decade, ended up mostly with Django, but I always kinda miss rails. But Django has treated me so well, just wish async and python in general had more legs on this side
What exactly is it with javascript that these people don't like? Does it offend them that the web becomes a more dynamic and colorful experience? I don't get it.
When I am on the web to consume information, JS is not required. It can be useful for some data visualization but that's it. This is, of course, not the approach taken by almost all web pages. (Even if you insist on collapsible navigation which is dubious at best, you still don't need JS, CSS is enough. https://codepen.io/raubaca/pen/PZzpVe )
In general, it is a mighty odd notion every random person who can throw up a web page gets to run code on my machine. This shouldn't be a casual thing, sandbox or not.
I have not written much JavaScript in my life, but from a user perspective I absolutely hate all the fancy animations and slow transitions. They are super annoying and tiring for me. Just give me the damn website as fast as possible.
And to achieve these cool animations websites have to load a shitton of javascript which makes them even slower.
Some may even be just CSS. I'm still waiting for a way to toggle the CSS ones off for all websites, without breaking them.
These often even look sluggish, but maybe it is a relative thing and some see the prompt movement of UI elements as unpleasant and call the animations "smooth". Or maybe it really takes a very powerful GPU on the right hardware to fully experience animations without feeling annoyed? Or both?
Sure, and if you want to define it as such you are free to only include documents in that definition. The rest of us will keep using the same protocols for accessing other things too and have another definition of www.
1999 was pretty great! I was running Linux, with a nice huge full-colour display running XFree86. Back then it was Mozilla, not Firefox. I had Emacs. TCP/IP and Ethernet had won. MP3s were common. Streaming existed, albeit the options were pretty poor. I had a CD player in my computer and a DVD player in the den. OTOH, CPU, RAM and hard drives were a lot smaller, slower and more expensive.
Here in 2024, I am running Linux, with a nice huge full-colour display running XOrg (because Wayland is still not ready for primetime). I’m using Firefox. I have Emacs. TCP/IP and Ethernet are still around, although if I want spotty performance there’s always WiFi. FLAC and Ogg Vorbis have mostly replaced MP3s. I can easily watch high-resolution video, which is a definite improvement. Streaming, too, has gotten a lot better. I have a CD/DVD RW drive in my computer. CPU, RAM and storage are a lot larger, faster and cheaper.
It’s not really that different, other than the spyware infesting the web. That pretty much didn’t exist in 1999.
I wouldn’t mind going back to 1999. The software I used had a lot less bloat!
JS is okay to write these days. I enjoy the fact that maps (objects), arrays, and functions are its native data language. But it's still weakly typed, which leads to all sorts of insane confusion during development. Above all, almost all of its libraries and frameworks are highly opinionated, try to monopolize the application architecture, lead to poor performance, and teach completely nontransferable skills that are useful almost nowhere else.
In general, minimizing the amount of JS you write improves all of these issues across the board. A minimum of JS is easy to debug and ridiculously fast.
Personally I don't think that the problem is that JS makes the web a more colourful and dynamic experience, but that the vast majority of that colourfulness and dynamism is just not good.
Hijacking the user's scroll, rendering the entire website content on JS at client-side (although the emergence of SSR has made this less of an issue. Who knew that not rendering all the things on the client device makes things better, I'm shocked…) and SPAs more generally (GitHub for example is so jank and annoyingly slow nowadays, it's just irritating), doing things like buttons and links with a `<div>` with an `onClick` instead of using the appropriate markup, et cetera.
Of course, many of these things are exactly opposite to the actual best web development practices. But why, then, is this shite so prevalent‽ It's also bad for things like accessibility, with screen-reader users and such sometimes struggling majorly because of myriads of badly developed web applications. Meanwhile a standard HTML document, with some CSS and maybe some JS for progressive enhancement just works. Of course, I know that many use cases require far more interactivity and dynamism than that, but is it such a big burden to not make the user experience worse with bollocks like reinventing browser scrolling?
A sad thing about the Github situation is that, until some months ago, it was perfectly fine for browsing directory tres and clicking to view files on the web, all that worked without javascript. Now it doesn't, except perhaps for the top-level and its README.
That's a shame, I used that a lot for quick browsing, checking and/or comparison of code in repositories hosted by Github.
At one point, Javascript was awful to write, and to this day is often the cause of awful performance or anti-features on websites. It's not hard to find some way to be mad at it, if you're looking.
It's gotten so much better to write, and most websites manage not to screw things up. But it only takes a few of them to put a bad taste in your mouth.
But don't worry, if there were any alternatives, people would screw them up, too. When WASM really takes off, it's going to be quite fun to watch. Everyone that hates JS will hate WASM even more.
The biggest offense to me (as a web developer, even) is the jank of js-rendered websites. This commonly means a blank, or (in slightly better cases) a skeleton page, which then often makes more network calls to get page content, which then *eventually* renders.
The 'build' tooling is terrible too, with layers of build-steps (due to incompatible code module types) that result in excessive script sizes. Due to the nature of Javascript, each byte is more computationally expensive than HTML or CSS.
TLDR: Websites are slower, and the fanciness doesn't add much.
The donation popup on Wikipedia is not a color I like. "Login to continue reading" and other fake paywalls don't create a more dynamic user experience...and fucking cookie consent forms, don't get me started.
I don't dislike JavaScript. I dislike JavaScript being used to make the web suck. So I have NoScript for when it sucks too much.
This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil.
You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money. That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project, then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company was stupid enough to pay me to do this!
This. I sit down the hall from the CEO of our company. I hear nearly every meeting and conversation that goes on. Don't think for a minute that most CEOs aren't scrounging money from useless bullshit circumstances half the time. They are very pragmatic and just really don't give a fuck where the money comes from.
If you work for someone else and carry out your tasks as instructed, and have tried to bring up the absurdity of it all as specced but they insist you do it anyway then I don’t see what would be unethical about it? Only talking about brain dead/useless endeavors, not bad/evil projects.
I program because I could do nothing else. I do it because it is the thing I most want to do with any given moment. The fact they pay me to do it is fortunate otherwise I would be homeless and programming in a shelter somewhere. I over think work simply because the aspect of “work” is entirely incidental to what I do out of passion.
That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and that also isn’t why I do what I do.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with also wanting the work you do to have a positive impact in the world. Whether it helps people, entertains them, or saves them time it feels great to get paid and also make a difference. Some may not be happy with just wanting a paycheque and that’s OK too.
There are actually companies to work for where you can get involved and develop ownership over things, and where how well you do relates to the success of the business. If you have a good relationship with your coworkers, you may even want to do a good job to try to maximize the likelihood that not just you keep putting bread on the table but they do, too! Crazier things have happened.
I've been in that situation before, but I'm starting to get to a point in my career where I've basically plateaued. And before you tell me that I just need to buckle down and re-engage, the company I'm currently at gives across the board 2-3% raises every year to their top performers and my team has delivered some really key strategic projects, so there's not really any point to doing anything else at this company. It doesn't meaningfully change my compensation.
I’m not sure more than 50% of the code I’ve written in about 20 years of this was ever actually used by someone who wasn’t, like, working on the project.
Much of the rest shouldn’t have been written. Total waste, usually easy to see.
A lot more that’s basically just rearranging shit for little reason.
Yeah… very little was useful.
At some point you just have to stop giving a shit. You’ll pay me how much to dig a hole then fill it back up over and over?! Sure thing, how deep do you want it?
I find it hilarious that we now present runtimes and other programming stuff like it was Apple presenting a new iPhone. This would be satire 15 years ago. No disrespect to Bun tho, I love Bun.
To make it less scary, don't make the host and password fields editable, just put placeholders in there for the user, like [HOST], so that they understand they will need to change it when executing it in their own environment.
Sometimes it just does. It decided the bees were immune to my immunity from bee stings, and completely disregarded that I'd ridden the tornado to the land of Oz where I demonstrated proficiency at killing witches
Probably needs prompt #1, to rewrite the users input to remove any implied outcome of the users action. Then pass this string into the original prompt.
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