> Long story short, if you are working on a personal project, please, consider the most dumb setup.
This is not limited to personal projects. I can’t recall more than a single project I’ve worked on during the last decade where front-end code was really useful. Some cool stuff, ok, but never worth the pain.
I acknowledge it can be useful. For some real time project. Not for your crud-for-a-living.
Nailed. It. Yes. I work with GCP (google console) for work ALL DAY. It is a layered gross mess of SPA. Example, I need to list the servers. It will take 10-20 seconds to load the list of 30 servers. I don't care about the cool glitching transitions or boxes with fades. I want to list the servers. Hit the back button? OH WELL! All your session data is now lost. Anytime I type in GCP the computer hangs while it processes thousands of lines of javascript to see if I will autocomplete. When I click "create" my browser tab hangs while my macbook pro fan cranks up.
I want to rewrite the GCP console with HTML, using their api and not one damn line of JS.
100% !
I know it's not comparing apples to apples.. but do have a look at Hetzner Cloud UX. It's FANTASTIC ! Super minimal, functional and I can almost bet they didn't use a"UX Designer" I got the feeling they gave the programmer-already-on-staff that could name the most colours the UX-Design-Job.
IT's such a joy to spin up servers and work in that UX compared to GCP and AWS !! Scaleway had a good one a few year back, but now every page feels like a "marketing flyer" that screams BUY-ME all the time :/
I have the same challenges with the AWS ui, managing thousands of EC2 instances. While the CLI makes it a little simpler, it's still slow as molasses.
Some of these problems are because of frontend cruft (perhaps with the goal of nudging users towards APIs) to be sure. But plenty of them are due to the reality that the cloud providers' backends often do not, ironically, work very well at scale.
It’s easy to use the simplest possible stack on a personal project. You set the requirements and you will probably end up setting requirements that work with that stack.
On a professional level, the requirements may mostly be for a basic CRUD app but it will have a few requirements for interactive or real-time features that are not possible with a static html crud app. The client is not going to want to hear your hacker news spiel about how JavaScript has ruined the internet. Now you’ve got to embed mini SPAs into your static html, and you’ve increased the complexity past what it would have been had you just used a SPA in the first place.
This is not limited to personal projects. I can’t recall more than a single project I’ve worked on during the last decade where front-end code was really useful. Some cool stuff, ok, but never worth the pain.
I acknowledge it can be useful. For some real time project. Not for your crud-for-a-living.