Web Components are bad for you

I used to look at Web Components like “what is this? Is it some modern thing I don’t understand, am I supposed to employ it now?”. As people move away from bloated JS SPA, some of them turn their attention to Web Components.

To not keep the suspense: Web Components are useless in their current design. The original idea of progressive enhancement is hopelessly lost, “you don’t need the JS framework” turned into Lit, Polymer, Stencil effectively creating frameworks on top of Web Components.…

State of decay in self-hosted commenting (Remark42, Artalk, Comentario code review)

I was looking for some convenient solution for simple self-hosted commenting, but instead was welcomed with a mix of personal playgrounds and vibecoding stands which are called “full-stack development” nowadays. I spent several days playing with those 3 commenting systems, studying and modifying their code, so this is not going to be a set of one-paragraph LLM-generated reviews, however, I’m still not deeply familiar with their codebase, so you might call it a “superficial code review”. In order of the encounter, here it goes…

What are microservices? (seriously)

I used to particupate in many discussions about microservices, but over time I began to notice one strange phenomena: when 10 people are talking about microservices every one of them has slightly different meaning of the word. It goes like this:
— Of course we use microservices. Our authorization lives in a separate microservice, game logic and stats live in the second microservices, and our PostgreSQL DB is a third microservice.…

Rust is a disappointment

I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.

There are several core problems with Rust:

  1. Its compilation is slow. I mean SLOW. Slower than C++.…

Your teeth were never supposed to rot

Pretty much every person today by the age of 25 year has several teeth with fillings. I actually knew few people who already lost a tooth by that time (i.e. depulped tooth, refused to put a crown, tooth cracked).
It’s astonishing that galley slaves and other malnutritioned people actually had no problem with teeth. Yeah, they did not live long, but what I want to emphasize is that there is nothing forcing you to have cavities in teeth. It is also well known that dental caries epidemic started approximately the same time as sedentary agriculture.

JS frameworks decision paralysis

I’m a bit late with a reaction, but I quited frontend development right when the madness hit the peak and it’s worth taking a glance back. It’s sad to conclude that madness won: we officially have approx 50-100 different JS-related frameworks…