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. —- – 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?
Story Published at: September 11, 2022 at 01:17PM
Story Published at: September 11, 2022 at 01:17PM