I would not be so sure. Maybe for a static web page this is possible. Outside of that I think people are kidding themselves. Writing code that might be stateless in isolation but relies on a database isn’t a stateless server imo, it’s just outsourcing state to another service.
With the SPA approach, you can have remarkably little state on the server because all the state associated with the user session lives on the frontend. The value of doing this obviously depends on the type application you’re making, but it can be a sensible approach in some cases.
Doesn’t SPA require polling the web server for more information? I feel like any website which retains information outside of the client device (like anything with a login page) would require state to be stored somewhere on the backend.
Typically, you just have a session cookie, and that doesn’t even need to be part of the app as auth can be handled by a separate proxy. The server just provides dumb data pull operations to the client in this setup, with all the session state living clientside.
That data has to be stored somewhere though. So you would still need some kind of database server to store it all or some other solution. That’s what I mean by outsourcing state. Data is still stored in the backend, just in a database rather than a web server.
There is data that gets persisted and needs to be stored somewhere, and then there’s the UI state that’s ephemeral. The amount of data that gets persisted tends to be small, and the logic around it is often trivial.
How am I being obtuse? You have been trying to trivialise the backend and now frontend as well. Backend isn’t just writing PHP or whatever, it’s setting up database servers, authentication proxies, and all that stuff. Not everything can be stateless.
I’m not trivializing anything here. What I actually said was that when all the UI logic lives on the frontend, then the backend just has dumb fetch and store operations along with an auth layer. In this scenario, the backend code can indeed be largely stateless. Specifically, it doesn’t care about the state of the user session or the UI. The only one trivializing things here is you by completely ignoring the nuance of what’s being explained to you.
The only nuances here seem to be: a) very simple websites need little state (but still aren’t stateless) and b) that you can move the state around to make something look stateless within a narrow view.
Evidently you don’t understand what people mean when they talk about stateless backend, so let me explain. The point there is regarding horizontal scaling. If your backend code is stateful then it has user context in memory, and requests for a particular user session have to be handled by the same instance of the service. With a stateless backend all the context lives on the client, and the requests can be handled by any instance on the backend. So now you can spin up as many instances of the service as you need, and you don’t need to care which one picks up the request. The fact that you might be persisting some data to the db in the process of handling the request is neither here nor there. Hope that helps you.
Yes that’s a stateless service but not a stateless backend. A backend to me is everything that doesn’t run on the client, including the database. Databases are not stateless, even distributed databases are not stateless. You can’t just spin up more databases without thinking about replication and consistency.
I’ve explained to you why the term exists, and why it matters. It refers specifically to application code in the context of horizontal scaling. Meanwhile, many popular databases do in fact allow you to do sharding in automated fashion. If you’re not aware of this, maybe time to learn a bit about databases.
Again. the goal is not to eliminate the statefullness of the whole stack. That’s just the straw man you keep arguing against. The goal is to remove context from the server. Once you get a bit more experience under your belt, you’ll understand why that’s useful.
The whole conversation was about backend being similar because you can write a stateless server. Have you forgotten? The issue here is a backend isn’t just one service, you can write a stateless service but you are in fact just moving the statefulness to the database server. The whole backend isn’t simpler than the front-end for that reason. It might be simpler for other reasons, though many popular websites need complex backends.
I am not arguing that a stateless service isn’t a useful concept. I get why people might want that. That’s not what this conversation is about. It’s about the backend vs frontend. Backend to me includes databases and other support services.
No, I have not forgotten. This whole conversation was me explaining to you the advantages of keeping the session context on the client. You are not moving statefulness to the database. The fact that you keep repeating this clearly demonstrates that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
The statefulness lives on the client. Everything I said about the backend application also applies to the database itself. Any node in the db can pick up the work and store the value. The issue being solved is having everything tied to the state in a particular user session.
To explain it to you in a different way. There will be a certain amount of data that will need to be persisted regardless of the architecture. However, moving user state to the client means that the backend doesn’t have to worry about this. The fact that you’re having trouble grasping this really is incredible.
I don’t write web applications for a living and I especially don’t write front ends. I do have to ask though:
What information are you actually keeping in the front end or web server? Surely you don’t need any ephemeral state that isn’t already stored in the browser and/or for you like the URL or form details. Only thing I can think of is the session ID, and that’s normally a server side thing.
I mean I’ve written web sites where there is no JavaScript at all, and the server is stateless or close to it. It’s not a difficult thing to do even. All the actual information is in the database, the web server fetches it, embedds it into a HTML template, and sends it to the client. Client doesn’t store anything and neither does the server. Unless I really don’t understand what you mean by state. You might keep some of your server fetches data from another server using REST or SOAP but that’s only used once as well.
Well, I’ve been writing web apps for a living for the past 20 years or so, and I’ve written lots of full stack apps. There can be plenty of ephemeral state in a non-trivial UI. For example, I worked on a discharge summary app for a hospital at one time. The app had to aggregate data, such as patient demographics, medications, allergies, and so on from a bunch of different services. This data would need to be pulled gradually based on what the user was doing. All of the data that got pulled and entered by the user would represent the session state for the workflow. Maybe don’t trivialize something you admit having no experience with.
So you do include ephemeral state that’s a copy of database data? If we were including that then every non-static website has plenty of state, but so does every web server. Whatever definition you are using must be quite odd.
What kind of polling are we talking about? If you are talking about realtime data, SSE doesn’t solve that either. You need SSE or WebSocket for that (maybe even WebRTC). If what you mean is that every time the page is refreshed then the data is reloaded, it is no different than polling.
Sure, but that only gets you so far. I think it’s important to distinguish between document sites where the users mostly just views content, and actual applications like an email client or a calendar. The former can be easily handled with little to no frontend code, however the latter tend to need non trivial amount of UI state management.
It will always be hilarious that Emil decided to “reveal” that Nate was one of the fascist troops on the ground executing unarmed Canadian rebels we see in Fallout 1’s opening scene
I just checked the macOS / FreeBSD man page for ‘stat’, and noticed the syntax differs from the version in GNU coreutils (which is what’s used in Linux). That’s probably the only thing that would need to be changed to make the script work on those other systems. It’s on line 526.
Fair enough. But macOS has more users than Linux, and is partly based on FreeBSD. The shell and the userland tools are from FreeBSD. I prefer Linux of course and haven’t used a Mac in years, but I still think it’s nice making scripts compatible with all *nix systems.
For sure. If you get something for free then it is what it is. Some of my scripts probably won’t work outside of Linux but I still make an effort to not use external commands if there’s no need to. I try to use the internal features of Bash as much as possible, mostly cause it’s just faster that way. A consequence of that is that the scripts are at least more likely to work on other systems (that have Bash).
The post literally above this one is about a manufacturing job with shit hours and pay and I work a 8-4 (sometimes longer) but im paid abnormally high (we start new devs at 70k and average dev is six figures).
But the other stuff like free time can absolutely suffer as even at the senior level, I’m taking so many courses and outside education to stay relevant.
I work almost 100% on a computer for a municipality using software that’s already 100% web-based.
But I have to drive 90+ minutes each way every day because a citizen might want to have an in-person meeting once every few weeks instead of an email or Teams meeting.
Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I’m a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I’m a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone’s money and is essential to the entire nation, I’m paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I’m a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
(Although, creating a webpage was the hot thing last decade, now the hot thing is creating an AI.)
A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.
Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.
Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.
You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.
That’s probably true. My father has been developing in COBOL since the '70s. I didn’t bother learning it because I was under the impression that he was being paid more for experience than his basic skills.
not sure what you’re talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there’s plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can’t or won’t. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
buddy there are a lot more reasons to be more than cynical about the economy, take a good look at things and you’ll probably want to bring out the pitchforks.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient … Buuuut… The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase… All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren’t that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.
On top of that, there’s no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.
I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That’s a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.
Backend code, basically what is ran on the server and manages user requests, database interactions, etc… Frontend is the user end, so managing input, displaying information from server requests, etc. and is in the form of an app or website page.
As a network guy…open up your favorite web-managed application and open the developer console. Inspect the transactions you see and compare it to the applications REST API reference, and you’ll likely find a lot of commonality (and maybe some undocumented endpoints!).
Backend made the API and everything that is performed by it. Front end is doing the GUI based off the response and promoting for input.
Ive always thought thsoe graphs were bullshit, im a college student and I have no time, energy, or money. I feel like this will not change drastically as i age lmao
Thank you! I’m happy if more people besides just myself have use for it. It’s a niche some people might not be aware of. Especially for younger people who aren’t familiar with the CD format, and how music is stored in those games. It might help people get more direct access to the OST of their favorite retro games. Instead of having to search around the web for high quality audio, they can just extract it themselves.
username checks out. The US is not the lesser evil. Its the greatest evil in the world. If Satan were at war with the US, i would support Satan because the US is the Greater Satan. amerikkka
Disagree on that they are the most evil, but yes they are also evil. China, Russia, US… They are all evil. But the US seems like the lesser evil to me.
Fucking hell. This isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact that the US is the enemy of the world. The US funds coups, destabilize, install military dictatorships, invades and bombs countries and it’s the only country in the world to drop a nuclear bomb on people, and THEY DID IT TWICE.
Stop making “wHaT iFs” in your head and actually look at the reality of what China does. It’s not even comparable.
You are not wrong. I agree they do all these things. And I don’t know what China does. I live outside of a China naturally, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on inside. We hear scary stories of course, and the leader of the country seems insane by western standards at least. I don’t think China cares about human rights very much. And I would not be surprised if people gets killed and made to disappear if they are inconvenient.
But honestly, I don’t know anything. I’m not there. I haven’t seen with my own eyes anything.
Admitting that is good. If all you’ve heard about China is the kind of propaganda you hear in the West, then you’re going to have a distorted view and think the kind of things you do. But that’s not an informed opinion, that’s just repeating the anti-China messaging from Western countries.
That’s the thing, you identified an issue, we constantly hear bad and scary stuff about China all the time, that’s western propaganda trying to turn China into the enemy so whatever the west, mainly the US, wants to do, becomes justifiable.
You don’t need to live there to know, at least partiatly, the reality of what goes on in the country nor it’s international relations. I’m not from the US, but I do know all those things I just cited in my last comment. All you need are good sources. You can start by studying how China handles its international relations. You’ll quickly realize that China doesn’t threat, embargo or invade other countries.
If you are genuinely interested you can learn a lot by visiting Lemmygrad and Hexbear, there are communities there to ask for information, and as long as you’re wanting to learn, you will be welcomed.
Also, Xi Jinping is not insane at all like the media likes to portray him. The statement is too broad for me to tackle any specific thing, tho.
I don’t think China cares about human rights very much. And I would not be surprised if people gets killed and made to disappear if they are inconvenient.
Again, very broad statement, what human rights and what you mean by this? This probably comes from more propaganda led disinformation.
Also, China is a massive country with 1.4 billion people. Do you really think we wouldn’t have proof of people being repressed, killed and disappearing? The people there aren’t isolated from the internet, they can access beyond the restrictions easily with VPNs which are common, it would be easy to show this stuff to the rest of the world.
Protests happen all the time in China and people critique the government, just like basically any other country.
If you want the perspective of a foreigner living there, I recommend the youtube channel Felipe Durante, he speaks Portuguese but the auto translate on youtube should be good enough, at least for english.
This pedantry is ridiculous, wrong, and annoying. The Han ethnic group that was in a relatively small patch of land ~4,000 years ago is hardly the same thing as the contemporary Westphalian sovereign state known as People’s Republic of China, which formed less than a hundred years ago and comprises many ethnicities.
They would if they could. Imagine China having a powerful air force like the US have. They would dominate every country in the world just like the US is doing. The US puts almost all their money into high tech weaponry as well.
The US is going after the middle east to get oil and to establish military bases for future domination. Has nothing to do with liberation or democracy.
Argument: your US chauvinism is unjustified and you should probably justify it. Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time with an undeserved smug attitude
Sure I work all my life to pay rent and the cops can murder me at any time for no reason and get away with it, but have you considered China worse somehow?
Skin color is completely irrelevant. Now I think you are just wasting my time and trolling. :) I’ve been called a racist like 3 times now. Is that what you guys do, just play the racist card in every discussion? Certainly seems like it so far.
Of course you are operating under the childish assumption that either of them would act like the USA, which is nonsense. Neither ever did so in their history. Russia was always happy to stay to itself and be secure, that meant you had a great neighbour and trade partner if you did not fuck with it. China could have conquered most of its neighbours multiple times it its history, but rarely ventured out of what are now the chinese borders, historically extremely defensive and trade oriented.
meanwhile the USA has been at peace for less than 15 years during its entire history. Of all those wars, almost all were ones of aggression.
You compare two sane people to a frothing berserker yelling “MAIM! KILL! BURN! LOOT!” ad infinitum.
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