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Comment by wefarrell | Hacker News Reader

"One group of web devs is great at picking the right tool for the job. Simple web applications get simple solutions. The complex SPA solutions only get brought out for applications that require it."

You could replace SPAs with almost any technology (Queues, Kubernetes, an RDMS as opposed to BaaS, Servers as opposed to lambdas) and it would be correct depending on your own background and personal bias.

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Can confirm. I once had as a team me a weirdo that would refuse to run ANYTHING on his computer outside of docker. From git, to his browser, to the mail client, to the editor...everything had to be in a container. His Thinkpad had more containers that our entire production cluster. What a waste of energy and time.

at least for me, that's the difference between someone on a senior level and someone that is not on that level yet. sometimes you just need to be pragmatic and say "this should be on an ec2 server with a simple html page -- no need for a react frontend that talks to a graphql endpoint that sends message to rabbitmq so another microservice can consume it".

also, being able to accept that a simple solution is good without putting too many barriers in front of that.

Just using an EC2 server typically involves a load balancer, a web server (nginx/Apache) and another web server like unicorn to manage the threads, and then a database at the bare minimum. That’s not objectively than using an SPA and a BaaS.

If you’re a front end engineer who’s used to working with node then an SPA + BaaS might be much simpler to you than running an EC2 instance that serves basic html.

Edit: and that doesn’t even get into securely managing updates, access controls, infrastructure, etc. those things might seem fairly trivial today but in the future imagine getting dinged for them in an interview.

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