My journey is mix I discovered web development fews years ago, not that long ago but still long enough. Having worked in companies and different tools and stacks whats my conclusion for 2022.
I used to be very die-hard you should use Ruby on Rails for everything, MVC is great and yada yada. There has also been a period I would have said you should use React, GraphQL and TypeScript and what not, some ideas came and some stayed.
So you might guess what would I say today, and that depends I would tell. I'm no longer the young developer that would advocate for newest and shiniest technology and the same time I'm not as stubborn as I have been before.
My decisions are based on four events, one with my co-worker back in 2020. I told how awesome jamstack and technology called Gatsby.JS and my co-worker told like if he was me he would just use page-builder a square-space. Looking back at him with surprise, what's square-space and why would use no-code tool?
It was beyond me back then, how dare you insult me I'm developer, I'm coder I write code. At the time we were building a management system that had turned into giant monolithic in Node.js which they tried writing smaller services into .NET
Months again I asked him again what would he use if you would greenstart this project one more time. He told me if he was given the option he would have gone with finish solution like SalesForce and add small customization on top of that.
Those words didn't mean much at the time, I was a rails advocate at and told him it would been much more enjoyable if he just used Ruby on Rails and it's golden pattern.
Following year I visit a somali speaking region back home, Hargeisa being a while since I have been there. Stuff have changed so much, the hotel I was on had website. You could do some booking to my surprise the website was build with webflow. Yet it worked well booking, contact-form and the links behaved really well, the site even scored well on google light house.
The third event, was me building a website for relative, the golden dream that I have been waiting for quite some time. Handpicking technologies what could go wrong, what I realised though, is that it takes to long to code anything. Maybe the web has become more complicated over the years, the whole process was slow and painful. I started to feel the pain with every keypress and the tight deadlines. One day the relative told me he wants to be able to change text himself, similar to how an editor in large news site does.
That meant suddenly I have learn a new headless CMS system like contentful and how to datamodel pages, yet another service to learn. Then comes another requirement handling contact form, I was looking into using something like getform.io
But by now the whole experience started feel a bit messy and not very 2022 on top of that the entire application felt duck-taped with thousand different services and bills up to moon.
(Forth) An incident occurred one day at work, which got me questioned maybe I have had wrong. One day at work when the deadline requirement could be meet and got some in the board pissed of. I realised that maybe coding everything from ground up is not such good idea.
Coding will always have place in my heart but tools like Shopify and Wix are darn good and should really be ignored?
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