There's six faces and two seeds. It's hard to describe, but if you bring them up in an image viewer and cycle through the directory you'll see it right away.
I came back to frontend development after a break of 10 years. Back then there was jQuery, CSS and HTML.
I found that the complexity of the tooling had increased 20-fold. All these build and task runners that were cool for a year and then a new one came along.
Those were the costs, but what was the upside? It seems that you can do maybe 10%-20% "more" than back then. It seems to me that this is a very very steep price to pay.
March 2020: Finding the body of my mother in the basement. She had died suddenly and unexpectedly that morning. The neighbours were alarmed because they couldn't reach her. I went to investigate. She was 74, so she didn't go too early and had a good death.
I realised that my life will be over relatively soon too. I decided to make it count (in little ways). Quit my job. Became a freelancer. Made a big effort to cut bullshit from my life. To give less fucks about irrelevant stuff. To be happier in simple and sustainable ways.
My favourite quote: "We all have 2 lives, the second begins when we realise we have only 1".
I firmly hope that javascript has peaked. The complexity of the tooling has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 10 years with subjectively very little to show for it.
Anyone starting out with backend webdev should learn Python Flask. There is no gentler and more thorough way of learning web fundamentals, whilst still being productive from day 1.
Flask is arguably objectively an extremely poorly written library and there are lots of alternatives out there that are much better, like FastAPI.
This is also pretty much obvious from the get-go. When handling a HTTP request, the morally correct function is something like a function which takes a request as a parameter and returns a response.
In flask, for no good reason, a lot of things that are only accessible inside a request get put into global objects, and if you try writing code that accesses them outside of the right context, it will simply crash. You might accidentally refactor such code to the wrong place and you will have no idea until it crashes. This kind of design on top of a dynamically typed language is kind of like drinking poison and then shooting yourself.
Flask is full of insane things like this and it boggles the mind that it ever got as popular as it has. I suppose there weren't many alternatives.
IIRC, Flask was originally written as a joke. It was also created in the era when using thread locals was still somewhat common but going out of style. I've always been a bit stumped as to how it got so popular. I usually recommend Django + DRF, Pyramid + SQLAlchemy, or FastAPI, depending on the project.
Yeah I’m not sure I agree with you. Spinning up a web server in Node.js using Koa takes minutes. You don’t need TypeScript or anything else really.
Everyone talks about the complexity of the tooling and I have no clue what they’re talking about. This is from a backend perspective. If you jump on the TypeScript bandwagon, which makes everything infinitely harder, then maybe, sure, I’d agree with you. But JavaScript is dead simple to use.
Even now in frontend land there’s still innovation. Vite has been an absolute pleasure to use and spinning up a React app takes minutes. The irrational hate for JavaScript is really weird.
I am curious why are you saying that. I know Flask well and while I never wrote something with bottle.py, it seems ~90% similar, at least in the basics.
For me, a big one is that Bottle.py has zero dependencies; the entirety of the framework, including the template engine, lives inside the single `bottle.py` Python script. That means it's simple to use even without pip or a virtual environment: just pop the bottle.py file in your project, import from it, run `python my_script.py` in your terminal, and you server is up and running.
From my experience with Flask (albeit, this was years ago), it was a bit more complex and ending up with circular dependencies was common.
To continue this metaphor: If I was hiring a skipper to sail my family over the Atlantic, I would absolutely hire the "lame" 40 year old and not the hip 20 year old
I don't necessarily disagree with you (I generally prefer tried and true), but to turn that metaphor around, there were (probably) many advancements in sailing since the olden days in the field navigation, communication and weather forecast, etc, so a younger or more up-to-date sailboat might have a better time predicting and dodging storms, or even shortening the journey. And any decent skipper would be taking advantage of technologies, even though he/she _could_ navigate with a compass and sextant if needed.
> even though he/she _could_ navigate with a compass and sextant if needed.
The person with 22 years experience could fall back like this thanks to survivor bias, the person with 2 years experience might have been lucky so far.
I had to wonder what FB chose as a cultural strategy that left them down for hours when other companies can recover virtually anything in under an hour and if a focus on being less cool and less ageist would have helped them.
