ollerac

As mostly tech workers, HN readers are woefully disconnected from the lives of everyday people who have been promised a path to if not wealth, at least some kind of comfortable lifestyle by working really hard.

And then the 2008 housing crisis happened. A massive betrayal by the government against its own people. Many people lost their houses, their retirement savings, and their investments. And who did the government bail out and prop up? The bankers, the elite, and the stock market. And this happens over and over again in countless banana republics across the world — the elite propping up the systems that support themselves and not really caring about anyone else.

So now, you have this massive movement against wall street (r/wallstreetbets & GME/AMC), the elite (Trumpism), centralized financial institutions (Bitcoin & DeFi), and the upper class of tech workers (web3). And you wonder why? People were promised a path towards wealth and have had it stolen away from them countless times. Now they are rebelling.

It doesn't matter if — technically & logically — Bitcoin, DeFi, and Web 3 aren't everything they're promising to be... People still need a place to turn to put their hopes that isn't the current system. They've just been burned too many times by it.

But none of this is going to work out in the long run... It'll be just like every other mania throughout history. Tons of investment, tons of apparent growth fueled by FOMO, and then a massive collapse when people realize no one actually cares about this stuff for its intrinsic value... But enough effort & pain & money will have gone into it by then that it will have created a nascent industry that will maybe, one day 10-20 years from now, take over the world and become the new normal.

TLDR: DeFi & Web 3 is an emotional reaction to a system that just doesn't work for most people, not the logical next step towards a better version of the status quo.

Why is it bad advice? Genuinely interested.

I'm interested in what's worked better for you and why you think no-code is a bad choice.

Use no-code

Hear me out.

The #1 problem you have as developers is marketing.

The #2 problem you have is validating demand from customers.

So force yourself to do the uncomfortable steps ASAP, while also making it easy to pivot by launching with the smallest possible stack.

If you can launch with something like Airtable + Webflow + Zapier + Typeform, you can get something out there in weeks instead of months/years. It will be relatively easy since your team is technical.

Then release it to the market and see if it sticks.

The power of a lightweight stack is NOT the ability to find Product-Market fit instantly.

The true power comes from making the 20-30 iterations it will take to actually find Product-Market fit less painful than if you had to rebuild from scratch every time you had a new idea.

I ran into so many issues with content-box a decade back I never thought about it again and always defaulted to border-box.

I think it's absurd that I can set a div to a specific width (100px, 200px, whatever) and the padding or border will make the div larger than that width.

It makes it so hard to think about designing a page when you have to continuously add together padding, margin, and border with the width to get the actual width.

You're right about flexbox and grid solving most of these issues -- and responsive design has pretty much done away with using exact pixel widths for anything, but I still run into some cases (especially around creating grid layouts that automatically reflow) where CSS columns and floats are the best approach (not often, but it still happens...) and then you need to rely on the width being the actual width, you know?

The easy way 10 years ago was FTP or rsync. It seems like that's still the easy way.

I'm wondering why nothing simpler/more automatic has popped up.

I didn't say it was harder today, I asked: "why isn't it easier today?"

I would think with improvements in tech, things would actually become simpler.

Hi Peter, what's the easiest way to set up a profit-sharing agreement with people working with me? Is there a standard contract?

Web app capabilities built in to the foundation of HTML and the browser.

Elements that know they're user-editable (images with upload controls attached to them to replace the image that's there, dates that trigger calendar controls when clicked, and inline editing for other elements that actually works and is consistent across browsers).

An offline database in the browser that has the concept of user accounts and resetting passwords baked in, as well as subscription payments, and has a universal API that can be automatically deployed to any hosting platform.

All of this would make building web apps and games trivial for so many more people -- write some basic HTML, upload it to one of a million platforms of your choice with a click, and you have a testing ground for a product that can grow.

It would be a way for anyone on the internet to build something useful and get it out there without learning a thousand technologies with a thousand nuances.

It's because of components.

Web app dev has started focusing on single, separate, reusable components instead of trying to design everything on the page at once.

Often, in these components, the HTML, CSS, and JS is still separated, but now (theoretically) you can plug that component in anywhere (even a different app) and, as long as you feed it the right data, it should just work.