The JS Ecosystem + The AWS / Serverless ecosystem is a love story of the likes of Harley Quinn and the Joker.
This week I picked up a gig working on a website for a non-profit organization, the needed some basic changes to a few forms. The reason they had to hire me, a web app developer, the site was built by some agency with Next.js / Jam Stack technologies, Contenful, AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify etc.
This simple website, is one of the most complicated monstrosities I've ever worked with. Every page downloads multiple megabytes of JSON from the Contentful API just to render dead simple pages with text and images. Every time there's a change in contenful, a new build in AWS Amplify is triggered to generate the site to static content... only the React code is so complicated with so many round-trip, nested server requests (n+1+1+1 etc) that the builds fail constantly because the API server (on lambda of course) which serves the Contentful content basically gets DOSed. I had to write logic to retry all app API requests just to get the builds to consistently work so I could work on the website. The code that transforms these megabytes of JSON into webpages must have been written by a mad man.
Also screw AWS for not building proper tools to debug AWS Lambda. Not having to manage servers sounds awesome, so everyone has started using lambda, but the developer experience of having to wait 10 - 15 minutes just to add a console.log line is like pulling out your own finger nails and then scraping them on a chalkboard. Then AWS built the most noisy, difficult to use and hard to navigate log management solution on the planet (CloudWatch), and started sipping their beers.
You can avoid these technologies all you want, but one day you're going to have to work with a project that choose to use them, and you can't control that. I believe library authors and service providers have a responsibility to think about developer experience that's being ignored. Or perhaps, since developers don't always have a choice in the technologies they use, building easy to use developer tools isn't worth it.
It isn't just JS apps that are like this though. I had to redo a site for a client a few years ago that was done in some horrific php CMS that had a whole site management architecture applied overtop of it. It was a nightmare to even change a page.
This week I picked up a gig working on a website for a non-profit organization, the needed some basic changes to a few forms. The reason they had to hire me, a web app developer, the site was built by some agency with Next.js / Jam Stack technologies, Contenful, AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify etc.
This simple website, is one of the most complicated monstrosities I've ever worked with. Every page downloads multiple megabytes of JSON from the Contentful API just to render dead simple pages with text and images. Every time there's a change in contenful, a new build in AWS Amplify is triggered to generate the site to static content... only the React code is so complicated with so many round-trip, nested server requests (n+1+1+1 etc) that the builds fail constantly because the API server (on lambda of course) which serves the Contentful content basically gets DOSed. I had to write logic to retry all app API requests just to get the builds to consistently work so I could work on the website. The code that transforms these megabytes of JSON into webpages must have been written by a mad man.
Also screw AWS for not building proper tools to debug AWS Lambda. Not having to manage servers sounds awesome, so everyone has started using lambda, but the developer experience of having to wait 10 - 15 minutes just to add a console.log line is like pulling out your own finger nails and then scraping them on a chalkboard. Then AWS built the most noisy, difficult to use and hard to navigate log management solution on the planet (CloudWatch), and started sipping their beers.
You can avoid these technologies all you want, but one day you're going to have to work with a project that choose to use them, and you can't control that. I believe library authors and service providers have a responsibility to think about developer experience that's being ignored. Or perhaps, since developers don't always have a choice in the technologies they use, building easy to use developer tools isn't worth it.