How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy

I always see this sentiment here but I just havent experienced any of it in 14 years with the Django ORM.

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to fill a fullstack role for the first time in several years.

First thing I noticed was that I couldn't roll an SQL statement by hand even though I had a distinct memory of being able to do so in the past.

I went with an ORM and eventually regretted it because it caused insurmountable performance issues.

And that, to me, is the definition of a senior engineer: someone who realised that they've already forgotten some things and that their pool of knowledge is limited.

Funny, I use prisma and pothos, with p99 at below 50ms - no N+1

(when it is not lower, then it is because there are sec framework and other fields that might not be mapped directly do the prisma schema)

we have AI that scans for any potential query N+1 right now

people forget how sql works??? people literally try to forget on how to program

more and more programmer use markdown to "write" code

That sounds plausible in theory, but I've been developing big ol' LOB apps for more than 10 years now and it happens very very sporadically. I mean bloated joins is maybe the most common, but never near enough bloated to be an actual problem.

And schema changes and migrations? With ORMs those are a breeze, what are you're on about. It's like 80% of the reason why we want to use ORMs. A data type change or a typo would be immediately caught during compilation making refactoring super easy. It's like a free test of all queries in the entire system. I assume that we're talking about decent ORMs where schema is also managed in code and a statically typed language, otherwise what's the point.

We're on .NET 8+ and using EF Core.

> Very (very, very) few large projects use plain JS (instead of TS) these days. Let's stop acting like all these people don't know what they're doing.

There are much better arguments to use TypeScript than "five billion flies can't be wrong". Most other popular tech choices are in fact rather silly.

OK, but that's essentially "argument by authority" + "everyone is doing it".

They certainly have their reasons and they definitely aren't stupid, but it would be more useful to know what those reasons are and in what scope they are applicable.

I make choices one of that is build a website in php. I do things from scratch so it involved learning the server, the setup (security/docker/podman), the stack (php/js/css/html). My limits made me do things. The code was and is ugly. Everything is a mess. There is no routing my URLs are pretty because of nginx rewrites. My limits make design choices like no user data because I cannot be sure about security. Once it is up and running you look at things like bootstrap to learn basics of css. Then you want it all gone because you learned the way of css.

I have no problem with sql but an ORM makes what I know about sql very ugly.

> Is self-control in coding just a lost art now?

Yes; a lot of people don't code because they need to make something work, they code for the joy of it. When the software they need to write is boring or solved - like another CRUD app, front- or back-end - instead of picking the boring and easy to build and comprehend languages and frameworks, they will make it interesting for themselves. Learn a new language, framework, or design paradigm; follow whatever is trending at the moment, etc.

A lot of new software is over-engineered from the start. A lot of that is cargo cult as well, e.g. big companies use microservices in their custom k8s cluster, therefore we should use microservices in our custom k8s cluster too.

Certain tools, or rather: ecosystems encourage overengineering and overhyping more than others.

Also the inverse though

Things like Wordpress sound super simple - you don’t even need to code!

But you do need to worry about managing an entire Apache server, managing a crappy database, hardcoding bullshit in PHP, cronjobs, cloud deployment and the fact that almost all “features” of it like plugins and themes etc are massive security vulnerabilities

I think the pitfall to avoid ITT is that there’s a single source of maintenance effort - there are likely many!

I have never seen this as the justification for using a framework.

As a rationalization, sure, but never as the reason.

They do offer more than coding standards.

> We grab a framework because we lack the discipline to keep something simple.

I grab a framework to also keep my skills relevant, especially if I'm not practicing them in my day job. If I didn't have that impulse, I'd keep it simple all the time. I'm really good at it, because I really dislike complexity as it requires me to remember more things and I don't really like that feeling.

I'll optimize if I absolutely have to.

Not that businesses ever cared about this attitude. I mean, I've seen it work. The work that I do with LLMs is quick and pragmatic. No need to put stuff into production when it's just a prototype. No need to use a framework if gluing an LLM with some Python code and a well crafted prompt produces the result we need. It allows me to ship in days, not weeks. Obviously, if one then wants it productionized, additional work needs to be put into it and possibly the code needs to be refactored. But, in my opinion, that's the time and place where that type of stuff should happen.

I intentionally avoided using a framework mainly to keep my code simple, and because the framework was too inflexible and I could not achieve what I wanted to.

This seems to me to be exactly what the post is about.

I don't think you're arguing against anything that was said in that post. There was never an "at all cost". The author was hedging even in the headlines ("indiscriminately", "before you know you need one" and "always, always").

If you have a business website, customers expect a clean site with good visuals and a great user experience. Unless you are as big as Amazon. Sadly overengineering things is a necessary evil nowadays. If I had the choice I wouldn't even build websites mobile friendly but well... got no choice.