Developing again

Post 6

Wed Jan 6 04:27:41 UTC 2021

Well.... yep. After a hiatus that lasted for over half a year I'm actually getting back into developing stuff with a team again. During this hiatus I wasn't a Luddite; I spent plenty of time researching and experimenting on my own. I joined the smolnet here, for example! But now it's time I get back in the saddle and start contributing to a team effort again.

How will I do it?

I'll be taking cues from my more recent adventures in Linux, FOSS and the smolnet. The web app we're going to be developing isn't going to be an 'app' at all. Not in the Progressive Web App, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink JavaScript mentality that seems to pervade modern web design and development.

As a rehabilitated full-stack dev I feel empowered to say that we're going in the backwards direction for this project as much as possible. The end user should be able to handle basic CRUD actions (or their abstract equivalent), which are what the majority of their actions will actually be on the backend, through our web page while utilizing a minimum of scripting and clientside processing power. Transmission of data should be through form submissions and basic requests that contain arguments in the URL, after the user is properly authenticated, and the server does all the thinking. In the case which that isn't possible, it's gotta be clean, simple, and handwritten. If we're trying to drag in a library or two or three to do A Thing, we're already off the beaten path and adding way too much bloat to our end-user's bandwidth.

Technical requirements and thoughts

While we will probably utilize some HTML5 features, and JS is all but required for modern authentication methods, the majority of the page and site should be able to function on anything that can run a 3G connection speed. Perhaps even less.... but that's a bar to raise in the future.

The pages themselves will be minimally styled and written accordingly. It needs to look dang good in its' simplicity, and not take forever to load. Especially in the name of avoiding "Flashes of Unstyled Content," otherwise known as.... yep. That's an acronym we use sometimes.

TLDR

We're trying to empower our users to do A Thing, and cutting out the fluff modern web dev is known for is something our team believes can help. Or at least... I've thus far managed to convince them!

End

So for anyone here on Gemini that's reading this.. just know that not everyone's into building for the Web as-is. Some of us are trying to turn back the clock just a wee bit, for the sake of sanity, honesty and driving effective apps to market at a lower tech and eco-cost.

Feedback

Are any of you trying to improve our society's reliance on the Web by building applications differently? Let me know at wholesomedonut at tuta dot io .