For me, Docker has been amazing. It’s probably my single most favorite tool in my tool belt. It has made my life so much easier over the years. It’s far from hell for me! 🐳
Tbh, all of web development has become this… efficient. I remember the days where I could create a website in PHP and have it done in a couple of hours (per page), and now the only way I can do that would be using AI and going full on “vibe coding” mode.
What do you mean? You can just make some react/typescript template and fastapi server thing, or any of dozens of equivalents, extremely quickly. I’m by no means an expert on web stuff as I develop software for controlling machines, but we used the above for some internal services in my last job and I could get a clean and functional site running in a day with no prior experience. I get that for public facing stuff you’ll have some higher requirements but I couldn’t imagine those wouldn’t apply just because you’re coding in PHP…
But the specs no longer call for a clean, functional site. Today’s “professional” web development specs call for user tracking, customized content per user per platform per locality the page is being served to. Then there’s the backend dashboard services showing the overlords user behavior patterns and how they change based on tweaks made to their ui, I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithms auto-tune presentation to optimize behavior.
It’s all the extra requirements, all the extra engineering that needs to be added that is IMO ruining web applications. Sure, they have huge benefits, but I hate when the application is simple but the backend is so overly engineered that it takes a week to completely build a fully fleshed out application. You have to organize your components, add styled-components.js, make sure it’s compatible with mui.js, create test cases for each component, setup a DB and integrate it to hold all copy as well as any input from the customer, make sure that it’s accessible (this part I admit that it’s important), make sure your test cases always pass, setup routing tables, add analytics, add pixel campaign api, squash git conflicts, integrate some other weirdo apis that marketing and leadership pulled from some obscure service no one has ever heard off, debug some weird edge case error caused by a node dependency 3 levels down, present the finished website to leadership only to be destroyed and now you have to redo 75% of the site with leadership changes… rinse and repeat.
Nah, the good ol’ days were when websites provided value to their users. The only competitively sustainable business model is the reverse: where users provide value to the website owners.
10 years ago this meme said “compiling” shows how much docker has made things more “efficient”
We’ve created this hell for ourselves
For me, Docker has been amazing. It’s probably my single most favorite tool in my tool belt. It has made my life so much easier over the years. It’s far from hell for me! 🐳
As a self-hoster, I love docker. It’s been an amazing deployment tool.
Tbh, all of web development has become this… efficient. I remember the days where I could create a website in PHP and have it done in a couple of hours (per page), and now the only way I can do that would be using AI and going full on “vibe coding” mode.
What do you mean? You can just make some react/typescript template and fastapi server thing, or any of dozens of equivalents, extremely quickly. I’m by no means an expert on web stuff as I develop software for controlling machines, but we used the above for some internal services in my last job and I could get a clean and functional site running in a day with no prior experience. I get that for public facing stuff you’ll have some higher requirements but I couldn’t imagine those wouldn’t apply just because you’re coding in PHP…
But the specs no longer call for a clean, functional site. Today’s “professional” web development specs call for user tracking, customized content per user per platform per locality the page is being served to. Then there’s the backend dashboard services showing the overlords user behavior patterns and how they change based on tweaks made to their ui, I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithms auto-tune presentation to optimize behavior.
It’s all the extra requirements, all the extra engineering that needs to be added that is IMO ruining web applications. Sure, they have huge benefits, but I hate when the application is simple but the backend is so overly engineered that it takes a week to completely build a fully fleshed out application. You have to organize your components, add styled-components.js, make sure it’s compatible with mui.js, create test cases for each component, setup a DB and integrate it to hold all copy as well as any input from the customer, make sure that it’s accessible (this part I admit that it’s important), make sure your test cases always pass, setup routing tables, add analytics, add pixel campaign api, squash git conflicts, integrate some other weirdo apis that marketing and leadership pulled from some obscure service no one has ever heard off, debug some weird edge case error caused by a node dependency 3 levels down, present the finished website to leadership only to be destroyed and now you have to redo 75% of the site with leadership changes… rinse and repeat.
It’s a good thing I fucking love my job 🙃
You know what you didn’t mention? Security. Privacy. Authenticity.
Ok yeah I totally get how that would be a burden… But I wouldn’t like to attempt doing all that stuff in PHP ;)
PHP still exists though.
Yeah, but why would I use it when much worse options exist
Maybe it’s time to go back to the good ol’ days
Nah, the good ol’ days were when websites provided value to their users. The only competitively sustainable business model is the reverse: where users provide value to the website owners.