zoul

I have had some very nice experiences with the app router, but I see what you mean.

I still hope they will get their act together in the latest releases, after all server components were a huge shift with a lot of rough edges to figure out.

A lot of what Next does/did _is_ leaning into web’s strengths. It was Next that made me declare image size beforehand, for example, drastically reducing layout jumps. It also made image optimization almost effortless, greatly improving load times for my websites. The web as a platform is a nice concept I would love to adopt more, but then I need to write some server-side code and I am completely on my own. Pushing the DX around the client/server boundary is one of the things that made Next great for me.

One of the things I liked about Next is that it presented a “unified platform” instead of the fragmented sea of hacks that is web development. Eg. I was initially taken aback by having to use a special component for images but then it made sense when I realized the platform handles image optimization and stuff like that for me.

But over time I lost the ability to reason about my Next code almost completely. Sometimes it’s the caching, sometimes it’s some little arcane code differences that turn my route into an unexpected type. There is some logic behind it, I can respect that, but I no longer have a coherent mental model of what the framework / the platform does.

It feels like the reality that the abstractions are trying to cover is too wild not to break through at places. Which, I guess, is just web. But it’s a pity, it felt good to have a saner, simpler platform to develop for in older versions of Next.

But it’s true in the general idea of Bluesky being highly centralized and dependent on a single for-profit entity.

Catching bugs in CI is orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than catching them as type errors while writing the code.

Static type checking greatly affects code design. That’s why converting from JS to TS doesn’t give you full benefits of the type system – the code doesn’t lean into types to model invariants.

For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.

They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.

As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.

This! There is a “Bluesky outage”. There is no “Mastodon outage”.

New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.