How Web Apps Ruined Developer Productivity - Forty Years of Code

[utterances-bot]

How Web Apps Ruined Developer Productivity - Forty Years of Code

Y2K heralded more than date-format hysteria, it was the dawn of web-based applications. I argue it was also the beginning of a steady and costly decline in enterprise developer productivity.

https://mcguirev10.com/2018/03/10/how-web-apps-ruined-developer-productivity.html

[SonicCodes]

Your post is really interesting, i quite share the same Ideology as yours, I don't understand why people are so into in the web of things (just made it up), sluggishly slow & resource consuming, i.e erp (using this as an example), because it's a static app, it's supposed to get static data and render it, the app will not most likely update ever.

[MV10]

@SonicCodes thanks for the comments. A result of this problem that I overlooked in the article is that there is a shortage of developers who have much experience building non-web-based applications. Even if management had the foresight to accept and overcome the painful process of halting this momentum, the available talent pool is pretty small. Another truly unfortunate result of web-obsessed design is the rise of awful ideas like Electron -- the attempt to turn web-bloat into native-looking desktop applications. By and large, you end up with the worst of both worlds. It's sad.

[BdR76]

Interesting blog post and I totally agree. It's weird how everything is a webapp now. I even saw a display that lists all the stops in a tram in Amsterdam, running on Chrome for some reason..

[MV10]

@BdR76 I alluded to it somewhat in the article, but I've come to realize there are many devs today who simply don't know how to write a program any other way. My wife recently goaded me into buying a "smart" TV, so I thought to myself, I might as well take a look at how app dev works for these things. You guessed it ... JS frameworks, and the whole steaming Angular/React/etc. stack. There isn't even any mention of any alternative dev model for the thing.

That's funny about the train schedule. I've seen something similar on those gas pumps that play insipid commercials while you pump fuel.

[BdR76]

Yeah especially smart TVs seem to have glitchy software. I sometimes use a Samsung one for Netflix, Youtube and one local tv app, and without exception all these apps crash or freeze from time to time. Not often enough to be completely useless but still.

Btw I posted this on reddit and someone pointed to a TED talk by Jonathan Blow which I found to be very interesting, it tries to explain the cause of these issues.

[MV10]

Haha, lots of reddit downvotes to your replies, typically that means you're over the target. :)

The whole mess became so unbearable (along with the cancer known as Agile) that I personally abandoned professional development and decided to ride out my remaining corporate years in a highly technical production support group (sort of "beyond Level 3 support" -- dump-file analysis and similarly fun stuff). At least there I have a chance of telling others how to fix their broken code. It's funny, though, that your reddit post mentions "5 year old tech" -- where I work it isn't uncommon to see 20+ year old tech in production usage.

Thanks for the TED link, I'll check it out later today.

[sjatkins]

In smaller companies not far removed from startup level the situation is even worse. Usually one walks into an environment where some 8-12 SaaS packages have already been selected to "save development time". Some one to three or ever four cloud providers have been selected to host various microservices or worse, part of various microservices. Full stack developer used to mean having decent backend and web front end chops. In small shops it now includes being at least 33% of a devops engineer as well. The developer spends most of their time fighting the vagaries of cloud platforms, pre-selected SaaS packages and various devops considerations BEFORE actually thinking about the software needs for the functionality of the business from a purely software side POV.
Think the average software monolith was bad? Try fragmenting your attention across those 8 to 12 software dev shops intentions and delivery schedules for thase SaaS products in use. In your space time try to understand the documentation and proprietary offerings of all those cloud providers and what you can and cannot count on. When done with that be sure to treak up and test test test your CI/CD stack on top of this house of cards. Heck, in many shops you can't write a line of actual core code without first having a working CI/CD implementation for the project. SOMETHING IS BADLY WRONG!