Haha, you are saying "waaaaay long time ago" and then 2022 in the same sentence :) Makes the rest of us feel really old. Golang and HTMX is just ridiculous. As that idea is something new. That's how PHP, ASP and all the others did it 15+ years ago! Returning json and having javascript do all the heavy lifting on the client side is something for all the fancy "new" frameworks that came after jQuery. Same thing with this recent move back to SQL, when everyone was raving about how completely crappy the relational databases where and all the cool kids should use NoSQL... And lastly, like you mentioned, this way of doing legos/puzzels when developing nowadays. I hate it. Nobody is actually coding any more. They just pick from a stack of tools/libs that OTHER people have written and glues it together. Everything is just a black box and nobody has any idea what is actually happening behind the code. Pull in one lib and it has thousands of other dependencies. I truly, with all of my heart, hate it. Soon, with better A.I, we will not even need these "glue developers" any more. Hopefully only the "true" developers will remain, but I fear even those days are numbered.
To me it’s all just layers of abstraction. Long gone (save for the htmx reneceance) are the days of directly doing html and css, we now have tools on top of those which we now work with and use. Pretty soon we will get some ai framework which creates react blocks and takes us up ANOTHER layer
@@bmdavis419 Agreed. But with each layer of abstraction, we know less and less about what actually runs. I personally hate it. Back in the days, when I finished a product, I really felt that I built it all by myself and could feel proud. Today, I feel nothing. All the abstraction is removing the feeling of accomplishment, pride and joy. I guess if you have been doing it this way your whole life/career, you will not understand what I mean. Regardless, I want to take this opportunity to say that I really enjoy your videos. Great quality and insights. Especially considering your young age. Thanks! The fact that you have time to test out all these frameworks and tools, build several projects, make youtube videos AND study at the same time is truly impressive.
I think you missed the point if you think that HTMX is ridiculous. HTMX in the frontend is just using some attributes for great interactivity, lazy loading and other stuff instead of writing tons of code in pure JS or jQuery or React to do the same thing. Heard about HTMZ today which is even smaller and faster.
Would absolutely love to see a video of your d3 implementation for the graphs on insiderviz, been trying to nail down a similar effort, heck - i'll even pay for that haha.
im doubtful that returning HTML is a good idea 1) it takes more bandwidth than just returning json. Depending on the client's specs and internet, it might be slower than having the client render HTML from the json 2) I assume if one is using go for backend, they are doing some computationally expensive stuff. Now if you'd want to turn that into API you'd have to rewrite it again 3) If you want to build simple things like a search functionality, you'd have to write your own javascript, unless you want to send the request to the server for every keystroke
Take into account that marshalling and unmarshalling JSON is not a trivial task that must be done both in the client and server. Browsers can directly render HTML
These are legitimate concerns, and I think it's cool you are thinking about these things. Thought I'd play devil's advocate on some of these to start some discussion! 1) There are actually many cases where the HTML response would be shorter than the corresponding JSON responses! Think about long field names and lots of nesting in JSON. And if you are rendering on the server, think about all the client side javascript rendering code you completely remove! React is a huge dependency, and even component rendering logic can add up. Generally, sending the rendered HTML directly from the server often saves the client from a lot of resources. In practice, I imagine JSON + client side rendering logic is almost always heavier than just the rendered html. When you also account for the fact the client needs to parse all that JSON and JS, it's hard to imagine cases where JSON and client side rendering is a better choice. 2) True, there is some rewriting necessary. But you should be able to mostly reuse a lot of code! All the request -> database -> data logic can be carried over. But instead of going data -> JSON, you just change that to be data -> HTML. JSON and HTML are just string representations of data at the end of the day. They aren't too different! 3) Sending requests to the server every keystroke would get problematic fast, good thinking! Thankfully, there's a simple solution to this problem: throttle the request so it only sends once the user stopped typing for 500ms! HTMX makes it easy to do this, see this example: htmx.org/examples/active-search/. You don't need to write your own JS! This all being said, I'm not a huge fan of HTMX. I think lots of apps are too interactive for HTMX to be viable. Though, I think a lot of modern web frameworks bake in this idea that returning rendered content from the server is almost always better whenever possible, and I love that they do that! React server components, SSRing in all frameworks, SSG, etc. are all examples of techniques to limit JSON and client side rendering. I ended up typing way more than I thought I would... sorry if this was overkill! Hopefully you or someone else finds this interesting haha. I'm curious to hear any additional thoughts you or other readers have though!
I'll be curious to see your 2025 vid. I suspect you'll cut that list of technologies in half haha. The longer you're in the tech world the more you realize a lot of the languages and frameworks don't make that much of a difference and you'll simplify your world by simplifying your stack!
@@bmdavis419 Thanks for the reply. So I’d guess you would advise against a custom backend if it’s not needed. Next / sveltekit have everything needed ?
IF YOU DONT KNOW JS AT ALL: - Stick to your backend and use it as an API Rest. Flutter fits with SaaS model (Web or Mobile). - Learning to build the UI and frontend logic would be better and faster for you than pursuing a frontend degree (HTLM, CSS, JS to TS, DIY libraries, node_modules, competing ecosystem, reinvent-the-wheel communities) in Svelte. - Dart takes inspiration from Java and C#. While SEO is not friendly there are some workarounds, see FlutterFlow and Rive success.
For a devops person like me, I use AWS, terraform, pipelines, etc. I'm also trying to learn everything else. All kinds of pains in the ass on multi dimensional levels. Svelte is awesome. Fighting between dynamodb and rds in my head. Serverless vs some containers. Terraform sounds hard but it's really nice to have modules I can copy paste most of the apps infra. Modualized mono-repo, but separate repos sound better for IP and exit. My god. What about user redis search cache ugghh. To much, but worth it.
lol this is exactly what my thoughts were for a while, I honestly kinda gave up on a lot of those and just simplified to full stack js on vercel, at least for now for me less is more
I'm enjoying following your updates! Most of the questions here are tech-related, to change the topic a bit, since you're going for an solo/small startup approach, business comes to mind. Are you doing marketing, store publishing, and everything under your name? Do you have a personal-brand LLC with many DBAs? Any thoughts you had on the business structure for publishing many, unrelated apps?
Yea my actual business organization structure is completely fucked right now lol, I have like 3 LLCs and a bunch of different projects with different people, it is not well put together. Will organize it pretty soon here, rn the only thing I care about is getting stuff shipped and money made
Hey Ben. Have you got much exp with Amplify or SST on the AWS side? I was thinking about using one of those because I just can't justify the 20/month pro subscription on Vercel for a couple of side projects so thought it might be worth the extra setup to pay a few pence for hosting. I can't seem to find any tutorials or documentation that makes any sense though!
if you need video ideas, I'd be interested in a video on the differences and similarities of how the mobile dev world/ecosystem compares to the web dev world. They seem like similar things to me, but I only know about web dev
Haha, you are saying "waaaaay long time ago" and then 2022 in the same sentence :) Makes the rest of us feel really old. Golang and HTMX is just ridiculous. As that idea is something new. That's how PHP, ASP and all the others did it 15+ years ago! Returning json and having javascript do all the heavy lifting on the client side is something for all the fancy "new" frameworks that came after jQuery. Same thing with this recent move back to SQL, when everyone was raving about how completely crappy the relational databases where and all the cool kids should use NoSQL... And lastly, like you mentioned, this way of doing legos/puzzels when developing nowadays. I hate it. Nobody is actually coding any more. They just pick from a stack of tools/libs that OTHER people have written and glues it together. Everything is just a black box and nobody has any idea what is actually happening behind the code. Pull in one lib and it has thousands of other dependencies. I truly, with all of my heart, hate it. Soon, with better A.I, we will not even need these "glue developers" any more. Hopefully only the "true" developers will remain, but I fear even those days are numbered.
To me it’s all just layers of abstraction. Long gone (save for the htmx reneceance) are the days of directly doing html and css, we now have tools on top of those which we now work with and use. Pretty soon we will get some ai framework which creates react blocks and takes us up ANOTHER layer
@@bmdavis419 Agreed. But with each layer of abstraction, we know less and less about what actually runs. I personally hate it. Back in the days, when I finished a product, I really felt that I built it all by myself and could feel proud. Today, I feel nothing. All the abstraction is removing the feeling of accomplishment, pride and joy. I guess if you have been doing it this way your whole life/career, you will not understand what I mean. Regardless, I want to take this opportunity to say that I really enjoy your videos. Great quality and insights. Especially considering your young age. Thanks! The fact that you have time to test out all these frameworks and tools, build several projects, make youtube videos AND study at the same time is truly impressive.
I think you missed the point if you think that HTMX is ridiculous. HTMX in the frontend is just using some attributes for great interactivity, lazy loading and other stuff instead of writing tons of code in pure JS or jQuery or React to do the same thing. Heard about HTMZ today which is even smaller and faster.
bro be looking like young post malone
Would absolutely love to see a video of your d3 implementation for the graphs on insiderviz, been trying to nail down a similar effort, heck - i'll even pay for that haha.
solid list! Cloudinary has a RN SDK in Beta btw 👀
hmmmmm... I have genuinely loved using it in the e-commerce project so I'll have to take a look
@@bmdavis419 as usual hmu if you have any questions
Would appreciate if you make a detailed video about deploying web apps !
Where did supabase go ? You suddenly switched to planet scale ?
Nowhere! Still using it for BLOK, I just prefer a basic DB for web. Supabase is my goto for mobile stuff at this point
@@bmdavis419 Alright, keep on doing these great videos ! Thanks for sharing.
im doubtful that returning HTML is a good idea
1) it takes more bandwidth than just returning json. Depending on the client's specs and internet, it might be slower than having the client render HTML from the json
2) I assume if one is using go for backend, they are doing some computationally expensive stuff. Now if you'd want to turn that into API you'd have to rewrite it again
3) If you want to build simple things like a search functionality, you'd have to write your own javascript, unless you want to send the request to the server for every keystroke
Take into account that marshalling and unmarshalling JSON is not a trivial task that must be done both in the client and server. Browsers can directly render HTML
These are legitimate concerns, and I think it's cool you are thinking about these things. Thought I'd play devil's advocate on some of these to start some discussion!
1) There are actually many cases where the HTML response would be shorter than the corresponding JSON responses! Think about long field names and lots of nesting in JSON. And if you are rendering on the server, think about all the client side javascript rendering code you completely remove! React is a huge dependency, and even component rendering logic can add up. Generally, sending the rendered HTML directly from the server often saves the client from a lot of resources. In practice, I imagine JSON + client side rendering logic is almost always heavier than just the rendered html. When you also account for the fact the client needs to parse all that JSON and JS, it's hard to imagine cases where JSON and client side rendering is a better choice.
2) True, there is some rewriting necessary. But you should be able to mostly reuse a lot of code! All the request -> database -> data logic can be carried over. But instead of going data -> JSON, you just change that to be data -> HTML. JSON and HTML are just string representations of data at the end of the day. They aren't too different!
3) Sending requests to the server every keystroke would get problematic fast, good thinking! Thankfully, there's a simple solution to this problem: throttle the request so it only sends once the user stopped typing for 500ms! HTMX makes it easy to do this, see this example: htmx.org/examples/active-search/. You don't need to write your own JS!
This all being said, I'm not a huge fan of HTMX. I think lots of apps are too interactive for HTMX to be viable. Though, I think a lot of modern web frameworks bake in this idea that returning rendered content from the server is almost always better whenever possible, and I love that they do that! React server components, SSRing in all frameworks, SSG, etc. are all examples of techniques to limit JSON and client side rendering.
I ended up typing way more than I thought I would... sorry if this was overkill! Hopefully you or someone else finds this interesting haha. I'm curious to hear any additional thoughts you or other readers have though!
the fact that responses like this get lost in YT comments is such an L, this is a very good reply, good points!
I'll be curious to see your 2025 vid. I suspect you'll cut that list of technologies in half haha. The longer you're in the tech world the more you realize a lot of the languages and frameworks don't make that much of a difference and you'll simplify your world by simplifying your stack!
SQL was developed in the 70s
oops
i was about to say the same! The best way to start a conversation online is to say something wrong :)
@@mattythebatty1 It happened, get over it
Hello Ben, what tech stack would you recommend for someone that does Backend but wants to create their own app / SaaS on their own ?
Any of the full stack JS, either Sveltekit, Remix, or Next
@@bmdavis419 Thanks for the reply. So I’d guess you would advise against a custom backend if it’s not needed. Next / sveltekit have everything needed ?
IF YOU DONT KNOW JS AT ALL:
- Stick to your backend and use it as an API Rest. Flutter fits with SaaS model (Web or Mobile).
- Learning to build the UI and frontend logic would be better and faster for you than pursuing a frontend degree (HTLM, CSS, JS to TS, DIY libraries, node_modules, competing ecosystem, reinvent-the-wheel communities) in Svelte.
- Dart takes inspiration from Java and C#. While SEO is not friendly there are some workarounds, see FlutterFlow and Rive success.
Php laravel can eat all web frameworks
For a devops person like me, I use AWS, terraform, pipelines, etc. I'm also trying to learn everything else. All kinds of pains in the ass on multi dimensional levels. Svelte is awesome. Fighting between dynamodb and rds in my head. Serverless vs some containers. Terraform sounds hard but it's really nice to have modules I can copy paste most of the apps infra. Modualized mono-repo, but separate repos sound better for IP and exit. My god. What about user redis search cache ugghh. To much, but worth it.
lol this is exactly what my thoughts were for a while, I honestly kinda gave up on a lot of those and just simplified to full stack js on vercel, at least for now for me less is more
I'm enjoying following your updates!
Most of the questions here are tech-related, to change the topic a bit, since you're going for an solo/small startup approach, business comes to mind. Are you doing marketing, store publishing, and everything under your name? Do you have a personal-brand LLC with many DBAs? Any thoughts you had on the business structure for publishing many, unrelated apps?
Yea my actual business organization structure is completely fucked right now lol, I have like 3 LLCs and a bunch of different projects with different people, it is not well put together. Will organize it pretty soon here, rn the only thing I care about is getting stuff shipped and money made
Hey Ben. Have you got much exp with Amplify or SST on the AWS side? I was thinking about using one of those because I just can't justify the 20/month pro subscription on Vercel for a couple of side projects so thought it might be worth the extra setup to pay a few pence for hosting. I can't seem to find any tutorials or documentation that makes any sense though!
I have heard good this about SST (never used), terrible things about amplify
Bruh the evolution of ur setup from 1yr ago to now is insane 😂 are u working full time?
yea I worked full time for ~9 months last year, now I'm a student again
if you need video ideas, I'd be interested in a video on the differences and similarities of how the mobile dev world/ecosystem compares to the web dev world. They seem like similar things to me, but I only know about web dev
Oh yea that’s a good idea (web is 100x easier and nicer lol)
Is golang that.... I want to learn it
Hopefully Tauri mobile is within the Horizon so we can code svelte onto mobile apps.
I really really hope so, when that happens I will be there