<story><title>Things engineers believe about Web development</title><url>https://birtles.blog/2024/01/06/weird-things-engineers-believe-about-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>The refrain against the &amp;quot;we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML&amp;quot; is often &amp;quot;well what about Figma and Photoshop&amp;quot;, which of course, yes those don&amp;#x27;t really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model.&lt;p&gt;The problem isn&amp;#x27;t so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The phrase becomes &amp;quot;well, what about Figma and Photoshop (and my mostly CRUD SaaS)?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I think a valuable insight that the MPA &amp;#x2F; minimal JS crowd is bringing to the table is the idea is that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t strive for cool and complicated tools, you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jayceedenton</author><text>This is motte-and-bailey argumentation in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The motte: SPAs are a good way to write highly complex applications in the browser, like Photoshop and Figma, to compete with desktop apps.&lt;p&gt;The bailey: SPAs are a good way to write most web applications.&lt;p&gt;If you attack the bailey, proponents retreat to the motte, which is hard to disagree with. With the motte successfully defended, proponents return to the bailey, beneficial for those enthusiastic about SPAs but much harder to defend.&lt;p&gt;The only way to tease this issue apart is to stick to specifics and avoid casting SPAs or MPAs as universally good or bad. Show me the use-case and we can decide which route is best.</text></comment>
<story><title>Things engineers believe about Web development</title><url>https://birtles.blog/2024/01/06/weird-things-engineers-believe-about-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>The refrain against the &amp;quot;we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML&amp;quot; is often &amp;quot;well what about Figma and Photoshop&amp;quot;, which of course, yes those don&amp;#x27;t really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model.&lt;p&gt;The problem isn&amp;#x27;t so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The phrase becomes &amp;quot;well, what about Figma and Photoshop (and my mostly CRUD SaaS)?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I think a valuable insight that the MPA &amp;#x2F; minimal JS crowd is bringing to the table is the idea is that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t strive for cool and complicated tools, you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>christophilus</author><text>That’s not why. In my experience, applications accumulate interactivity over time. At some point, they hit a threshold where you (as a developer— not an end user) wish you had gone with an interactive development model.&lt;p&gt;Also, for me, the statically typed, component-based approach to UI development that I get with Preact is my favorite way to build UIs. I’ve used Rails, PHP, ASP (the og), ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, along with old-school native windows development in VB6, C# Winforms, whatever garbage Microsoft came up with after Winforms (I forget what it was called), and probably other stacks I’m forgetting. VB6 and C# Winforms were the peak of my productivity. But for the web, the UI model of Preact is my favorite.</text></comment>