I agree. We are moving away from HTMX at work, to React. (After we moved away from Angular. That was…a choice…that I didn’t make.)

Here’s the thing: there’s still a place for HTMX. Lots of places. But “building an SPA but not actually and SPA” is not a lane for HTMX. Nor do they promote HTMX for that purpose. Really quite the opposite.

Different tools for different jobs. (Me? I honestly love React, just a more minimal stack. Zustand and TanStack and Vite. No Redux or Next.JS)

Yeah, typically I end up building websites (for myself and others) in basically three "lanes". Static HTML/CSS files, great for docs, presentations, reports and similar. Or, websites with some interactive/dynamic elements, HTMX is great for this. Or, fully fledged "client-side apps" where it's more of an application than website, then I go full out dynamic programming with ClojureScript and similar approaches.

I'm not sure why so many people seemingly fall into the trap of trying to find one tool and then use that absolutely everywhere. I mean, I'm familiar with it as in "it's fun" as I used Nix as a framework for a static website builder, but I keep seeing people making those sort of choices professionally too. Like when React first became popular, then suddenly people try to jam it into absolutely everything, until they slowly walk back and then after some years agree that maybe it's good for some things, not for everything and not as a default.

As someone who has conducted a ton of systems design interviews, the "I used these tools at my last job so I will use them for this completely different problem" is bamboozling.

OTOH, there are advantages to comfort picks. You know the APIs, you know the common libraries in the ecosystem, you know the quirks and pitfalls. It might not be optimal—and in production it compounds—but for dinky personal projects or finite-scoped professional things, it's understandable.

Ha, that was me and Hugo, back in the day, for static sites.

And, yeah, HTMX is truly great for sites with limited interactivity. You really, really do not want or need a full React Leaning Tower of Pisa stack for a simple presentational website.

> Here’s the thing: there’s still a place for HTMX. Lots of places. But “building an SPA but not actually and SPA” is not a lane for HTMX. Nor do they promote HTMX for that purpose. Really quite the opposite.

> Different tools for different jobs. (Me? I honestly love React, just a more minimal stack. Zustand and TanStack and Vite. No Redux or Next.JS)

My concern with is that i build line of business applications for a living, and literally, every project i work on ends up growing in scope such that even the simplest ones, reach a point where the customer asks for items that are just much simpler to do with a front-end framework. And these are often cross cutting concerns, such that it is not as easy as simply adding some js to one page.

Example: "i want to be able to reorder all the columns of all the tables of the website, and hide some columns, with my preferences remembered for each table". Customers pull that kind of thing off their hat every time, such that even "basic websites" can move out of the trivial territory any time. And this is just the most trivial example i can think of.

I want the tech stacks i use to be future proof, as in not having to rewrite everything when requirements become more complex (as it is also typically a time where we aren't given much time budget, as they need it for yesterday).

For something for which i fully control the roadmap, i may consider htmx (but even then, even my own products grow in ambition rapidly) however for customer projects i find this choice way too risky.

I need to be able to capitalize on the tech infrastructure i've built as requirements get complex, both due to customer time constraints and because this is where we get some of the highest profit margin from our work. Having to rework most of what i've done every time a complex requirement comes up, would be inefficient with this regard.

To me it's a case of knowing your tools in depth, to make meet most requirements (including from a performance perspective). Maybe erlang or go would have been more suited for a project from a philosophical perspective but since i specialize in .NET + angular, unless there is hard blocker, i'll use this tech stack, and everything is fine from the perspective of the customer. But i gain that the project is future proof and i won't need to reengineer it when it moves of its initial sweetpot.

From the same author: https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-no

Thanks for sharing, I agree with what he says.

I've reached a point in my career where i can essentially call the shots as far as engineering and even product direction is concerned.

But recently had to do some consulting as an IC due to circumstances (worst case scenario deal closing delay), and i can tell you that there are places where non-technical people make tech decisions without consulting anyone. Also in my already quite distant qconsultant past (wow, time flies) while it has always been common for me to sort out requirements, and help with business analysis to align them with engineering, even when you dismiss flying unicorns, the class of core requirement evolutions that can make you regret choosing a tech stack is still very large. I've seen a couple of folks fired literally due to this.

Even now that i call the shots and sell products rather than time, the roadmap uncertainty is still high (largely driven by the need to make products user-friendly enough based on feedback), so i default to .NET + angular as it keeps my game open.

B2B2C at the cross-roads of ecommerce, fintech, blockchains. So you need to deal with vendor integration requirements while making the integration user-friendly from a UX perspective + and keeping your own core UX premium, especially for the B2C segment, and being competitive. Requirements change fast, especially at the beginning, so you don't want your engineering to constrain you or make things more difficult than necessary.

Nice. Curious about your views on SolidJS?

I walk by a lovely local toy store every day.

https://www.playtoysandbooks.com

I live in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, and it’s a small bit of joy to have a thriving boutique toy store to walk by as I go to the gym.

Hey, long-time Flickr user who migrated to Google Photos for a somewhat specific use case. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi)

I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7

And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.

Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.

Thanks for the feedback and feature request. I don't hear this request often for Flickr, but it's a core and beloved feature on our other platform, SmugMug, which you might want to check out if you haven't.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.

I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.

> no overt politics

Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?

That's like saying going to Washington DC at all is "politics."

It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.

It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.

May we do better on the next election.

No, it's just a business tax. Do you see Cook getting on twitter and parroting the god emperor's topic of the day?

I saw Cook going to the private screening of the Melania biopic on the same day Alex Pretti was killed.

It's not a tax, Tim Apple gave him the gold personally, with cameras in tow, he did not submit the ACH data to the IRS.

It's bending the knee.

Why degrade himself, what can Trump do that their trillions cannot cushion?

Same difference. "I spent millions/billions that could have been avoided because I did not want to appear to degrade myself" doesn't sell very well to stakeholders. The CEO should do what is in the best interests of the company, and in the US when Mr Trump is president, it is in the best interests of the company to bend the knee.

So you think he is a Trump supporter, then? I would have guessed precisely the opposite. My assumption is that the trophy was his way of looking out for the best interests of Apple. In that regard probably a fairly good ROI.

> So you think he is a Trump supporter, then?

He literally gave him a gold trophy! How is that not support? It's beyond compliance in advance.

To a president hell-bent on overturning Obergefell v Hodges, even.

He gave him more gold than Maria Corina Machado.

A bribe

It’s a total cliché rite of passage to buy one of these when you move to Chicago.

And I am typing that as I look at the Edgewater poster hanging right there over my desk.

Or for Chicago natives leaving Chicago.

> Edit : Sorry I'm asking specifically about paywalled stuff

Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence article summary. Like this:

> Not All Malls Are Struggling

> A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising bright spot for real estate investors.

You do not…please correct me if I’m wrong…and cannot get a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert legacy media company here].

Which is deeply frustrating. It’s obviously a way to cut off the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c’mon, please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for it.

In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to automatically pop into Reader mode (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader view in Safari is a decent fallback.

Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.

It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

You are not the only one.

I have an ASUS ProArt Display 27” 5K. And I somewhat regret it.

I love the pixel density. But I don’t love the matte finish. Which is apparently a controversial take. But I really don’t. I like the crisp pop of typography you get with a glossy display. And, for UI design, the matte finish just doesn’t “feel” like the average end-user experience. I am constantly pushing Figma between my laptop display and my monitor to better simulate what a design will look like on an average glossy LCD or OLED display.

I've got that display, too, and quite like it. Matte finish is essential (IMO) if you're annoyed by reflections.

I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store.

I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

Ha, I’d argue it starts right at Pekin.

That puts several university towns below the line. But little towns outside big towns in the Midwest have their own vibe.