> Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:
> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work
At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.
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> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic
I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).
It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.
> 2. When NOT to use the truck... when talking or the bike is actually the better way to go.
Some people write racing car code, where a truck just doesn't bring much value. Some people go into more uncharted territories, where there are no roads (so the truck will not only slow you down, it will bring a bunch of dead weight).
If the road is straight, AI is wildly good. In fact, it is probably _too_ good; but it can easily miss a turn and it will take a minute to get it on track.
I am curious if we'll able to fine tune LLMs to assist with less known paths.
My understanding is that the base layer (similar to what FlatPak provides) is shared and downloaded by the snap manager so it is portable as long as you want to download it.
The end result should be similar to FlatPak where you have practically no dependencies as it should package almost everything.
See, that's the issue. I want my distribution to distribute the dependencies I need to run applications outside of containers. That's, like, it's main job man.
It is relatively easy to replicate if you open 2 apps and start typing in the first one which opened, both on macOS and Windows (I don't use Linux enough to notice this issue).
A proper solution is probably faster startup times, but overall it pretty much never happens? Idk maybe I'm lucky or just conditioned to ignore it.
I've been looking at native development for quite some time now (WPF/WinUI/SwiftUI, starting with Win32 and AppKit), and honestly Web technologies are much better than that. The fact that it is cross-compatible is just a cherry on top.
If finally WASM gets a cheap and easy way to manipulate DOM, I think even more stuff will move towards web tech like Electron and hopefully Tauri in the future.
I totally agree. I don't get why people feel so strongly that native apps are better. The web technologies we have are great both from a developer experience perspective and a UX perspective. People hate on electron apps but I think this is mostly due to bloat from electron. I hope Tauri closes the gap it's been great for me so far.
There are some great native apps out there and a lot of them do things you couldn't do on the web, but nowhere near close seems like a stretch to me. There are some great web apps out there. And while there are great native apps made with love there are also perfunctory, rushed, clunky ones that could have just been a website.
People often overlook some of the functional UX the web brings to the table. For example: on the web I get consistent search and text highlighting behavior, consistent notifications, consistent navigation behavior (back buttons, history), I can tab to focus (usually), and I can use plugins to customize the content. Even the idea that you can reset the application state with a refresh is something I wish I had on some native apps.
They never look and feel exactly like native apps, even the ones that try a bit.
Some widget will be rendered wrong, they'll use the wrong font (or even hinting!), right click may not work as expected, they won't use multiple windows correctly, etc.
Even React Native gets some of this wrong, although few use that on desktop.
If you're a user that appreciates consistency on your OS, all of this will stick out and annoy you. And you'll end up using Apple's Mail.app over GMail's UI.
Things.app, Bear.app, and a few others from the macOS side are nice example of UX.
While the web can be great for RAD, the native side gives you raw control when you want it. And actual desktop UI widgets, like table, list, and windows.
What kind of forms do you need? I honestly feel people think they have to use all sort of dependencies. There are some you definitely need, like the router or any state management (you can build both, but there is a decent amount of boilerplate and efficient hooks can be tricky).
But for forms I honestly would recommend to start with plain React and only abstract things you need in your project.
Node.js is a runtime, not a language. It is quite capable, but as per usual, it depends on what you need/have/know, ASP.NET Core is a very good choice too.
In my experience ASP.NET 9 is vastly more productive and capable than Node.js. It has a nicer developer experience, it is faster to compile, faster to deploy, faster to start, serves responses faster, it has more "batteries included", etc, etc...
It has terrible half-completed versions of everything, all of which are subtly incompatible with everything else.
I regularly see popular packages that are developed by essentially one person, or a tiny volunteer team that has priorities other than things working.
Something else I noticed is that NPM packages have little to no "foresight" or planning ahead... because they're simply an itch that someone needed to scratch. There's no cohesive vision or corporate plan as a driving force, so you get a random mish-mash of support, compatibility, lifecycle, support, etc...
That's fun, I suppose, if you enjoy a combinatorial explosion of choice and tinkering with compatibility shims all day instead of delivering boring stuff like "business value".
I used to agree but when you have libraries like Mediatr, mass transit and moq going/looking to go paid I’m not confident that the wider ecosystem is in a much better spot.
Node is a lot like PHP of old. Pretty bare-bones, but has lots of other people's code you can use. The problem is most of it doesn't work.
Dotnet is batteries included. It has all the features you'll need, almost. If you need something else, the packages you find are just much higher quality.
I want to be able to create self-contained GUI application that are relatively small and can be just copied and run on another computer. Installation should be an option, not a requirement. From my evaluation, WinUI3 doesn't offer that.
WinUI3 offers that, it's just not the recommended way of building+deploying.
What you are looking for is "unpackaged, framework-dependent". This will build an application like an old-school WinAPI executable, one which expects the relevant DLLs to be installed on the host system (or distributed in the same directory).
I know that these days a lot of game and application developers just render a custom UI to a 2d or 3d rendering device. I've been looking for a UI framework like that as I don't want to write my own, but so far most of them have been either web based or require their own mini-language and compilation step.
You mean just self-drawn controls or also immediate mode GUI?
I haven't tried it, but there's ImGui.NET (or a bit easier ImGui.Forms) immediate mode GUI. Downside is no accessibility.
Avalonia uses Skia to draw controls, although it primarily uses XAML to define UI.
The issue with self-drawn controls is that creating such framework is a lot of work, so smaller projects often have issues with things like accessibility.
EDIT: Just did hello world test with ImGui.Forms. Self-contained AOT compiled result was 7 MB.
Within game development it is predominantly immediate mode as it more closely resembles the main game loop. With other applications I'm not sure, some I know just use ImGui and run an immediate mode UI, others would be retained mode.
In my case I'm looking for a C++ UI library, not .Net. Also not a fan of immediate mode GUIs either, so would want something more traditional.
I don't want to write my own, so will probably try Qt again, but might switch to a custom library in time.
I did try to develop an unpackaged test application but I gave up trying to implement it and just went with Win32 instead as I wanted make something rather than messing around with a UI framework.
These days if I were to switch from Win32 I might try some custom rendered framework which a lot of apps seem to use, or Qt.
I really hope they do and the rendering engine is decently decoupled, I'll give a try building a framework on top of it.
I wish all platforms gave access to their rendering engine similar to DOM on the web, imo SwiftUI/WinUI (or WPF, but they are very similar) are not that good.
Haven't built anything native on Linux, though, no idea how good those are.
What do you mean by access? APIs to program against or fully open sourcing the rendering engine? Because you can mix SwiftUI with a few different rendering frameworks at varying abstraction levels that it itself renders to (AppKit, UIKit, Core Graphics, Metal etc.)
Basically I want an API available to build my own SwiftUI. Definitely not on the Core Graphics level :)
But good point, I actually think AppKit might be a good abstraction level. I'll play with it a bit and see if I can abstract it behind a good component model.
It is a ton of C++ for what is essentially something that an OS like Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS or the browser would provide anyway. Apps that use it ship with a substantial minimum amount of bloat, e.g. Flutter for web.
Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:
> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work
At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.
---
> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic
I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).
It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.