Hopefully this can be a fruitful discussion since I think I have a quite clear but also reasonably common set of needs. I have a feeling that if you're "in the world" of frontend engineering you get a much more intuitive feeling for these tooling questions than I can get at a distance by reading SEO-spam developer blogs and State Of JS (although the latter does seem really helpful).
I'm thinking of building a text-annotation based app _alone in my spare time_. The core usage loop is about viewing and interacting with "visual markup" applied to a body of text. So lots of tooltips/hoverbars I guess.
Some notes about my needs:
- This would be by far the most complex GUI I've ever built.
- Relatedly, I expect to get the UX design horribly horribly wrong and start from scratch at least once.
- I also suck at making things look pretty and also don't find this problem very rewardinging to think or read about.
- All of the above point towards a framework that is pretty easy to get started in and prototype quickly.
- Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it.
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- Despite what I said about quick rampup I'm fine with learning new languages.
- Weak typing is a deal-breaker. If using JS, must have good TypeScript integration or similar. (Does anyone still write plain JS?)
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- I don't think I'll want a native desktop app but an iOS/Android version could make sense. But I'll never have time if this can't share most of the code with the web version.
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- I don't really have the discipline for manual testing. Luckily I also find it satisfying to over-invest in test automation. I don't really know how this is done in frontend land but good tooling would be a big plus.
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- I'm happy to sacrifice one or more of the other requirements in favour of tools that are likely to be maintained 10 years from now.
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What are HNs thoughts?
I'm thinking of building a text-annotation based app _alone in my spare time_. The core usage loop is about viewing and interacting with "visual markup" applied to a body of text. So lots of tooltips/hoverbars I guess.
Some notes about my needs:
- This would be by far the most complex GUI I've ever built.
- Relatedly, I expect to get the UX design horribly horribly wrong and start from scratch at least once.
- I also suck at making things look pretty and also don't find this problem very rewardinging to think or read about.
- All of the above point towards a framework that is pretty easy to get started in and prototype quickly.
- Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it.
----
- Despite what I said about quick rampup I'm fine with learning new languages.
- Weak typing is a deal-breaker. If using JS, must have good TypeScript integration or similar. (Does anyone still write plain JS?)
------
- I don't think I'll want a native desktop app but an iOS/Android version could make sense. But I'll never have time if this can't share most of the code with the web version.
-------
- I don't really have the discipline for manual testing. Luckily I also find it satisfying to over-invest in test automation. I don't really know how this is done in frontend land but good tooling would be a big plus.
-----
- I'm happy to sacrifice one or more of the other requirements in favour of tools that are likely to be maintained 10 years from now.
----
What are HNs thoughts?