Ask HN: How did web development become so bizarrely complex?
📰 Hacker News · mathewsanders
Learn how web development complexity has evolved over time and why it matters for modern developers
Action Steps
- Analyze the current web development workflow and identify areas of complexity
- Evaluate the use of headless CMS and React client apps in simplifying or complicating the development process
- Consider alternative approaches to rendering PDF documents, such as linking directly to the file
- Assess the role of automation and QA in streamlining the development process
- Research ways to simplify the development process, such as using templating engines or reducing the number of individual elements in the CMS
Who Needs to Know This
Web development teams, including developers, designers, and product managers, can benefit from understanding the evolution of web development complexity to improve their workflow and productivity
Key Insight
💡 The increasing complexity of web development is driven by the adoption of new technologies and methodologies, such as headless CMS and React client apps, which can both simplify and complicate the development process
Share This
🤔 Web development used to be simpler, but now it's a complex beast! 🐺 What's driving this complexity and how can we tame it? #webdevelopment #complexity
Key Takeaways
Learn how web development complexity has evolved over time and why it matters for modern developers
Full Article
I’m recently joined a new team where we are tasked with building out a website with around 15-20 unique pages. There are 3 main types of pages, and the majority of them are lists of links to external PDF documents. We’re using a headless CMS with content in the page broken into hundreds of individual elements, where a React client app renders the data from the CMS API to our users. In addition we seem to be grabbing the PDFs from the server, converting to Base64 and then rendering as an object in the react app (rather than just linking to the pdf file directly). The team (4 developers, 1 automation/QA, 3 designers, scrum expert, product owner and product manager) is in their second quarter working on the site, and aiming to release this MVP next quarter so around 9 months to build 15-to-20 page site. When I started my career 20 years ago, this is the type of project where maybe 2-3 people would build out over a few weeks. When Content Management Systems were first introduced, one
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