Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 5

@jenniferplusplus hot take. People don't actually hate ORMs. They hate databases. But they can't actually get rid of the latter. 😂

This was a great read. It gave me a lot of thoughts about how we overbuild a lot of things these days. "Boring" technology still works really well even up to pretty high scale.

"Serving a billion web requests with boring code"
https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/06/Serving_a_billion_web_requests_with_boring_code.html

Yep. I noticed that. It's worth noting that he basically says "I didn't want to choose this. But building a multi page site would've taken longer."

That's a hell of a statement. I disagree in general of course. But the context is important. Essentially he makes an assessment of his team and what they would able to get up to speed with. Building a SPA with react is the only thing they knew well enough to give them confidence. There is a lot to unpack there.
https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/112759194466807431

In many ways, the most "boring" technology is the one your team already knows well. Always bet on existing experience and expertise before asking your team to learn something new.

However, I think it's a huge problem that we currently live in a world where there is no equivalent to "boring technology" for frontend. As an industry, we've lost the collective knowledge of what the boring alternative looks like.

FWIW, I wouldn’t make this assumption that the frontend is simple. I think it’s way more likely that the author has a bias towards backend and just didn’t give as much detail about the frontend. https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/112759270193346522

Instead of doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to try to get phanpy running in glitch.

It doesn't quite work. Something is missing with the vite build setup. It doesn't output the environment variables.

FYI. There are some other warnings. The default build configuration seems to want node version 18+. But glitch is still stuck on node 16. That doesn't seem to stop it from building though.

https://glitch.com/edit/#!/phanpy-social

@sue if I run this locally with node 20, it works out of the box. It's probably a versioning thing with either node or npm. It's weird that it actually builds in glitch, but then just does the wrong thing somehow? Thanks for taking a look. To be clear, this is not important or urgent for me. Don't go out of your way on my account.

@hrefna @FeralRobots this is real. The big challenge in front of us that the right is motivated and hella organized. They send people to every fight. And sometimes all you gotta do to win a fight is be the only one that keeps showing up.

@ironchamber yeah. Maybe we shouldn't say it gains nothing at all. There's clearly some nice things about using modern systems that are better supported. But the benefits are almost never worth the costs of migration in my experience. So it becomes an exercise in actually making the tough tradeoff by giving up something you want.

I'm in a less ranty mood today. I'm curious to follow up on this specific message about urging companies to do framework migrations. Did anybody read this advice and think "oh no. I think he's talking about me"? Did this create any moments of reflection for anyone?
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112617486629605715

A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings.

If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.

I will die on this hill.

If your product is still around in 5 years, you're doing great and you should feel successful. But guess what? Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. That's just how the frontend community has been operating, and I don't expect it to change soon. Even the popular frameworks that are still around are completely different. Because change is the name of the game. So they're gonna rewrite their shit too and just give it a new version number.

Product teams that are smart are getting off the treadmill. Whatever framework you currently have, start investing in getting to know it deeply. Learn the tools until they are not an impediment to your progress. That's the only option. Replacing it with a shiny new tool is a trap.

Imagine having 8 billion people on this planet and telling a single individual that they need to get better at "multi-tasking". Like, why tho?

I wrote up a bunch of the lessons I learned while trying to get the official mastodon image running in docker. It ended up being quite long. Sorry.

I think the audience for this post is mostly the mastodon devs. Maybe they can help answer why some of this stuff is the way it is. But if you're a person who is interested in errata around docker, rails and mastodon, it's for you too!
https://polotek.net/posts/local-mastodon-in-docker/

Multiple people were able to get a mastodon instance running locally with my modified branch. So definitely try that out if you're interested.
https://github.com/polotek/mastodon/tree/polotek-docker-build

Okay I'm look for some testers for my mastodon docker setup. I've created a branch with the changes that work cleanly for me. The instructions are sparse, but I'm hoping it "just works" for someone else. If so, I'll write up a blog post with more info.
https://github.com/polotek/mastodon/tree/polotek-docker-build

I'm looking at mastodon some more today and probably tomorrow. On our last episode, we reached a milestone of getting a local mastodon build up and running using docker. The docker part is important, because my goal is to get *two* local instances running and have them talk to each other. I'm thinking that's the easiest way for me to be able to inspect the ActivityPub protocol more directly.

What are some high level questions people have about how mastodon works? Maybe I can use those for guidance as I explore. I'll share any answers I'm able to uncover.

We got solar on the house last year. It wasn't necessarily about saving money for me. It became important to me to take a concrete step towards combatting climate change.

But something else started to dawn on me too. The fact that I'm now generating my own power, from an essentially unlimited source, is a truly radical act. I've been thinking a lot about creating a society centered around abundance instead of scarcity. It's not just theoretical.
https://assemblag.es/@theluddite/112496059286904697