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As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of thing

As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past. Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Retool etc.

bdcravens 4y ago
Indeed. I'd rather put my energy into solving unique business problems, rather than wiring up another standard table, form, or chart.
- LionTamer 4y ago
  Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets) Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qualified to work on the underlying libraries they depend on. We are locked into our server frameworks, our database engines, our front-end frameworks, our authentication library, etc.
    - LionTamer 4y ago
      I feel like “vendor lock-in” is fundamentally different when you’re (a) not paying for the underlying libraries and don’t have to worry about future price hikes (b) can edit and modify the underlying source code to suit your needs. It also seems like you and I are having very different experiences with how much boilerplate we need to write to get simple programs working. In streamlit[1] for example you can get a dashboard up and running in minutes. [1] https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/
monkeydust 4y ago
Well said. Somewhat related and on front page of HN right now: https://www.worklife.news/talent/developers-are-burned-out-quitting-their-jobs-and-creating-a-crisis-for-recruiters/ https://www.worklife.news/talent/developers-are-burned-out-q...
LionTamer 4y ago
> we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist Why would people building software today need to do that? There are excellent, “batteries included” polished versions of plenty of the things we need to build software: package managers, developer tools, machine learning libraries with the latest algorithms, testing & CI/CD tooling, UI components, web servers, databases, etc. There’s even entire applications that are FOSS, if you want to build a new tool there’s nothing stopping you from adding whatever you want to a pre built FOSS application like LibreOffice, Calibre, etc.

bdcravens 4y ago

Indeed. I'd rather put my energy into solving unique business problems, rather than wiring up another standard table, form, or chart.

LionTamer 4y ago
Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?
- bdcravens 4y ago
  As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets) Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qualified to work on the underlying libraries they depend on. We are locked into our server frameworks, our database engines, our front-end frameworks, our authentication library, etc.
  - LionTamer 4y ago
    I feel like “vendor lock-in” is fundamentally different when you’re (a) not paying for the underlying libraries and don’t have to worry about future price hikes (b) can edit and modify the underlying source code to suit your needs. It also seems like you and I are having very different experiences with how much boilerplate we need to write to get simple programs working. In streamlit[1] for example you can get a dashboard up and running in minutes. [1] https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/

monkeydust 4y ago

Well said. Somewhat related and on front page of HN right now: https://www.worklife.news/talent/developers-are-burned-out-quitting-their-jobs-and-creating-a-crisis-for-recruiters/ https://www.worklife.news/talent/developers-are-burned-out-q...

LionTamer 4y ago

> we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist Why would people building software today need to do that? There are excellent, “batteries included” polished versions of plenty of the things we need to build software: package managers, developer tools, machine learning libraries with the latest algorithms, testing & CI/CD tooling, UI components, web servers, databases, etc. There’s even entire applications that are FOSS, if you want to build a new tool there’s nothing stopping you from adding whatever you want to a pre built FOSS application like LibreOffice, Calibre, etc.