On: Prototyping a YC Startup Each Day

[meredydd]

With respect, I think you are speaking from the position of someone who has known how to use this technology for so long, he has forgotten what it was like not to know it.

Take your "90% go to for web" stack. You'll need to know:

    * HTML
    * CSS
    * JS
    * Ruby
    * SQL (maybe)

And then the frameworks:

    * Rails
    * Bootstrap (or equivalent)
    * Vue (or equivalent)
    * Webpack (or equivalent)

And then the deployment:

    * Web server of choice
    * Database setup
    * Linux sysadmin
    * AWS

There was a front-end dev guide linked on the front page yesterday (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap). Just...look at it. Count the pages. Even if you stipulate that you already know Rails, the rest of what you need to know is still a huge wall to climb.

And sure, by now, you have all that knowledge in your head, same as I do. (Probably better; I always hated web programming.) But asking somebody new to scale that wall just to join in with the supposedly open web? Seems a little much.

And I'm still pretty confident that I (with Anvil) would deploy a simple application faster than you (with Rails). Not because you're a bad developer, but because even with all your knowledge you're still navigating that stack - and deploying it, and debugging it, and editing it without autocomplete because no IDE can sensibly autocomplete a system with that many independent layers, and so on.

[chacham15 → meredydd]

I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion. Its not that navigating the stack that introduces the slowdown, its that making your own choices as to what that stack will be leads to a very specific stack that not many are using. Because of that the tooling for that specific stack is most likely non-existant meaning that you have to context switch a lot to perform common tasks (now, if you're good at context switching, it might not be a problem). Its the same problem of working in a high level vs low level programming language. If you're trying to do something that the high level language was designed for, you'll have a good time, but if not, you might just be shit out of luck.

[bdcravens → meredydd]

> * Vue (or equivalent)

> * Webpack (or equivalent)

Many web apps don't require a Javascript framework.

[delinka → bdcravens]

Nor Ruby and Rails

[bdcravens → delinka]

True, but most require some sort of backend. Many of those apps can still exist with little or no Javascript.

[treis → meredydd]

> And I'm still pretty confident that I (with Anvil) would deploy a simple application faster than you (with Rails).

Did you build the anvil.works site using your tool?

[davidjnelson → treis]

That was something that was pretty neat about bubble.is. Even though their offering is very very low code (plugins).