stevoski

It’s a website for a commercial product. Of course it is self-promotion! How could it possibly not be so?

This is the great paradox that many people have observed: why are we still using frustrating, buggy, hard-to-use, expensive software all day?

I remember this guy back in the dotcom boom days, more than 25 years ago, who made an app that got acquired by Yahoo.

He claimed that Common Lisp was the best programming language for web apps, and that it gave him a massive advantage in creating his app.

What was his name again? Paul something? Oh yeah, Paul Graham.

I recall sitting in a seminar in Australia, conducted by an American man called Buck Rogers. I had a moment of disbelief when he introduced himself.

I later found out that he had legally changed his name to Buck Rogers to intentionally be noticed.

Reading back, I can see how you interpreted that way.

But the quote from the article is in the context of a 1-person dev team, and how by keeping things really simple so that it is indeed _possible_ to build a feature in the morning and have it live in the afternoon.

> I want to build a feature in the morning and have it live in the afternoon, and anything that gets in the way of that has to go.

Love this!

The philosophy behind how the author runs his app is very much like mine - go for simple, proven tech that you know really well.

(For the people dismissing the article because AI, you are missing out on a good read.)

My understand of the article is that it makes exactly the same point, but in more detail.

This video is simply excellent. Really shows the challenges involved.

His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.

I once met an Irish person who was detained at Beirut Airport when (trying to) leave the country, and who then disappeared into the Lebanese prison system. Really, he just disappeared.

Luckily he was allowed to make a call just after being detained, to his friend who worked for the British Council in Beirut. The friend was tirelessly in searching for him and seeking his release. It wasn’t easy.

(I met him just after his release, while he was building the courage to try again to leave the country.)

Why was he detained? Because his common Irish first name and common Irish surname matched someone on an Interpol list.

Part of the beauty of htmx is how simple it is to recreate. As this post shows, the fundamental concepts of htmx really are straightforward.

Of course, there are all sorts of edge cases and minor features to add to make it complete.

> I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.

Likewise. 3 or 4 years ago, I ripped out two-thirds of all the JS in my B2B SaaS by using htmx with server-side templating. So much simpler.

The ethos of allowing a return to a simpler way of building a web app resonates with me.

As a database person, this was hard to read. I wanted to find out what the problems are and solve them.

A db table with only 10k rows? Even a full table scan should be extremely fast.

And with SQLite - which I assumed runs in-process, but even if not, surely is running on the same physical server? Faster still.

Of course, the magic phrase in my head is “create index”.

I hope Julia posts an update!

Edit: I highly suspect the “slow deletes” problem is a classic “n+1” problem suffered by many ORM users, until they come to understand more about the underlying db interactions.