Frameworkless, Frictionless, Free by György Kovács

You awaken in the barren wasteland of your mind. Released from the shackles of your NPM dependencies, you are alone, but free. With only your trusty TypeScript compiler at your side, how much can you build? How far can you go? And when you get there, will you find only despair... or joy?

Time to find out.

I'm Gyuri, originally from Hungary, currently living in Austria and trying to get people to pronounce my name correctly. Eternally curious about all things programming, whether it's web frontends, CPU architectures, or hardcore database optimization. When away from a computer, I enjoy board games, bouldering, and books.

[nic_s]

This was an awesome talk. I've been trying to talk to other devs about this topic for years now, but I'm kinda bad at explaining myself :p

About 6 years ago I was faced with a rewrite. Although it's true that hindsight is 20/20, there were some general things with the current project I wanted to see if I can avoid.
1. It felt very much like I was maintaining 2 apps... the front end app and the back end app and I had to keep both in sync as well.
2. Although most 3rd party tools I used worked, I often had to bend them to my will and often even override certain parts to get the exact result I wanted. Had quite a bit of bloat after 7 years of dev...
3. Businesses/Clients don't want to spend money on expensive hardware. So they always had low end, very old, or low end and old hardware that didn't like having to handle tons of JS.
4. I wanted to rather focus on long term productivity and maintainability. I think the industry is way to obsessed with "how fast can I build something today" and then 10 years later the company has millions of lines of code that was build with 3 different versions of whatever framework they chose and none of the original developers are there still.

I could not find anything that fit what I wanted to do and HTMX wasn't a thing yet. So I came up with my own ideas and patterns and made the server do pretty much all of the work. It's really simple... user interacts with page, interaction is sent to server, server processes the interaction and updates State, and then IF needed... send back some HTML to update the UI.

Came up with my own way to template HTML and a generator so I don't have to write any HTML by hand... I just define what I want and the generator spits out the actual HTML. No more typos messing things up :)

I have zero 3rd party JS. The JS I do have is extremely simple and is mostly just to handle some user interactions... here and there...
It is fast... real fast. Especially on devices with crappy SOCs like old handheld scanners.
I have absolute control over how everything works... what updates, when, or how is an open book and I'm writing the book.
I learned more about JS and CSS in 1.5 years than I did in the 12-ish years before...

I've been working in software for almost 2 decades, but coming up with these ideas, building it, and it all actually working better than I hoped, was the best 1.5 years of my entire career. I didn't realize it at first, but for the first time in my career I was actually building something instead of sticking 3rd party pieces together.

By no means am I saying everyone should dump what they are using and just roll it on their own... if there is an off the shelf tool that does exactly what you want or need, then use that.

[narrei]

i like the message and most of the points, but i gotta point out: he said not to use orms and in next step proceeded to write first lines of his new orm

[neociber]

I really though the first example was to point out how complexity grows due to edge cases.

The conclusion I get is that you pick your own poison, you can't really escape complexity.

In a lot of cases we just query a database, render HTML and send it to the user any tool can solve that until weird requeriments and bugs start appearing.

[IsayanBros]

I don’t understand. He says don’t use React because it’s complex, then promotes htmx which is complex. Advises not to use ORMs, then writes one. Hello?