[benjaminmikiten]

For someone who's "too stupid" to understand these techs, they certainly can explain them and their drawbacks and alternatives well.

This reminds me of a bit of advice from Austin Kleon that I've used frequently -- "Make bad art, too"[^1]:

> “Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something.

This is a perspective I have to come back to, as an engineer building enterprise-scale things, when I'm working on small-scale projects. I don't need to use the same tools I use at work, I can pick "bad"[^2] architecture, I just need to build _something_.

[^1] https://austinkleon.com/2020/04/15/make-bad-art-too/ [^2] "Bad" in that I know precisely how and when and what would bite me in the ass when I try to scale it.

[quickthrower2]

For a side project I used some PHP to get a job done. Why? because you can edit the file on the server and keep trying it out till it works. On 90s style hosting that is cheap and honest. The iteration speed is amazing. CI/CD took <100ms.

[bbkane]

When I wrote PHP on the server I had real problems with the "CI" part- I would refresh my page an manually test each change. Do you have Continuous Integration tests (i.e. automated) for this code or are you also doing the manual refresh cycle?

No shame either way, I think the juice isn't worth the squeeze for automatic testing short-lived code myself

[quickthrower2]

Sorry that was my silly subtle joke. The CI I am referring to here is refreshing the page! And I agree the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

(I love CI systems at work and wouldn't live without them, but that wait time :-(, so everyone tries to get the OODA loop on their local machine )

One idea I had would to build an Elm-like backend language BUT with PHP's "edit the file on the server and it runs" nature. Combine that with some source control, forking and more of a VSCode editor on the server, and you would have a nice DX for small projects.

All those features exist but they live in different languages/stacks, you can't have them all at once (I hope this is where someone replies "you say that... but have you tried X"!)