3,769 karma · joined May 3, 2016
There is one fullstack JS job. Three JBOSS jobs and six DJANGO jobs.
This isn’t unique in Europe.
We’re part of several muniplacity driven OSS communities though, where we buy OSS development from small startups and take ownership over project management as well as the codebase.
None of the startups are big on node.js, it’s nostly python, .net, java or php because that’s what they teach at the universities and it’s what they work with in their free time.
I think the node.js environment is great, like I said, but I don’t think it really has much adoption in Europe.
We used to see a lot more of it from our suppliers, but it seems to be rapidly going extinct. Possible because there just aren’t a lot of JBOSS developers/maintainers in general.
I am coloured by my environment of course, but I do work in software cooperatives with 97 other muniplacities, as well as a few European communities and I don’t see anything to indicate that .Net, JAVA and PHP won’t remain the dominant techs in Europe for the foreseeable future.
I like node.js, I use it for hobby projects and I genuinely think graphql is a lot better than rest APIs (and there isn’t a graphql adaptation for .Net that isn’t bad), but I just don’t see the adoption anywhere outside of what you hear from American startups.
And again, I didn’t say .Net would rule all web development , I said it would be important, and if the European public sector continues to run on .Net then it’ll continue to be a billion dollar industry.
Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.
I mean, I can go on job databases or LinkedIn right now, and there isn’t a single full stack JS job available in my entire country. There is a lot of JS including jobs of course but they all require you to also/mainly do C#, JAVA, PHP or Python because JS is almost exclusive used on the frontend.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually really like the JS environment. There’s a reason we moved to it, but it’s not like it doesn’t have its flaws either.
I think WASM will absolutely change web development, but I think it’s already made it to the is, I mean, we’re launching our first minor Blazor app this week, and it’s something we typically would’ve build with vue and graphql Apollo, but now it’s all C#.
The world of enterprise typically moves slow though. We’ve recently bought an on boarding system that’s made with web forms for instance. You may laugh at that, but the truth is, at least in my part of the world, that JS hasn’t seen that much adoption outside of hobbyists. Eventually these companies are going to upgrade their client sides, but would you pick modern JS or full stack C# if you were coming from web forms? Hell even if they go vue, react or angular chances are they’ll still use .Net on the backend, as that seems to be the trend pretty much everywhere except for us.
The core tech behind these is in 95% of the cases either .Net or JAVA.
Our in-house development has moved from .Net to JavaScript, mainly because we’re small and if our front end had to be JS then our backend might as well be, but now you have something like Blazor.net emerging, allowing for full stack C#, of course we’re going that route.
I didn’t say all, but I frankly think it’s obvious that .Net will play a big part of web development future, considering how big a part it already plays today and considering how Microsoft is moving it forward in all the right ways.
I mean, here in Europe many of these right groups and parties are even funded by a foreign nation state. They’ll call it fake news, but it’s actually in their own books. You can’t be a political organisation without having public books here, and every right wing movement in my country is mainly funded by Russia. They may have different names, but they’re extremely organised.
Maybe that’s different in America, but I doubt it, though it’s obviously harder to prove if there isn’t public records.
We set these up at libraries and other muniplacity buildings that already offer citizen things (English is my third language sorry).
We also have voting busses that go to low voting neighbourshoods and we obviously setup voting in nursing homes, hospitals and such.
But the process is always you, alone in the booth, with a piece of paper. Unless you have a physical handicap, then two officials will help you vote.
Taking a photo of your ballot is illegal, but as you say, it’s impossibil to enforce. You do have options though, we use pencils in the booth and you can always ask for a replacement ballot until your vote is cast. So you could technically take a photo and still vote another way.
Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission.
IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again.
I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these years, but their main goal is still to sell you Azure. I think they won the hearts and minds with .Net core though, I mean VSC is the best ide and typescript is typescript, but the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core.
Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked.
You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware.
I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues.
Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do.
You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them.
I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.
I’m well aware there are other problems, but I think that’s actually part of my original point. ISIS is a problem, but it’s a problem we’re actively fighting. No one seem to be taking the radical right in America serious in any manner. Even though these years, the radical right is killing quite a lot of people.
I live in Scandinavia, the worst terror attack ever in our part of the works was Brevik, a far right terrorist who murdered hundred of political youths in what he viewed as a crusade against the left.
In my own country we’ve seen an increase in hate crimes committed by the right being doubled every year since 2015. So it’s not like we’re not familiar with the problem, but unlike America we actually treat these people as a serious threat to our democracy.
The radical right, the radical left and radical Islamists can all be dangerous at the same time, and I think they are, what I don’t get is why you treat them so differently.
It wasn’t until after the war Germany started to censor things, and today they’re arguable leading the free world in terms of liberal values. The political views on individual rights and freedoms in modern Germany are a lot more similar to the American revolutionaries than those of modern day America after all.
I think ISIS makes such a good example because it brings out the flaws of the anti-censorship arguments. Almost no one is opposed to censorship as long as it’s for something they turly disagree with, and it’s really hard to defend ISIS in any level.
You’ll find some anarchists who want nothing to be censored, but you’ll find very few advocates of places like GAP that also defend the rights of ISIS, even though the rhetoric against entire religious groups like Jews is actually a lot worse on GAP than they are on ISIS twitter.
Don’t get me wrong, im not advocating for censorship, I just think the difference in opinion within the US is weird. I mean, how can you both want censorship for your opponents while simultaneously wanting complete freedom of expression for your own views?
I have anxiety and even though it’s not really hindering me in any way, I still double check my damn bag before I enter a store and I always make sure to get a receipt to be able to prove I paid, even though I’ve never even been looked over by store security.
Normal people wouldn’t notice, but grocery stores are designed to think some of their visitors are thieves, and if Amazon Go took that away from the experience I’d honestly never shop anywhere else.
Nobody had any problems with ISIS getting censored off the internet, but these right-wing nut jobs somehow have a right to spread their equally harmful propaganda?
I don’t get it.
Our system is a little different, here every citizen is mailed a “ticket” they can exchange for the voting ballot in the weeks leading up to the election. If yours is lost in the mail, no worry, we can print you a new one, and you can’t really use someone else’s because it has your name on it and we check.
In every ticket there is a barcode that we scan, to speed handing the out ballots up, this also counts the amount of voters, and that’s the digital part of the election. It’s also the most burdensome, so this is where digitisation saves us time.
The voting is done on paper and counted in hand, and checked with the amounts who have passed through the digital system, if it’s off by more than 1-3 votes there is a recount until it fits.
The counting takes a few hours at each location, but it’s done by the same people who’ve worked the voting place all day to ensure the safety of democracy, so it’s not really that expensive or inefficient.
And that’s not accounting for the cost of voting machines. The digital part of our elections is the most expensive part of the process, because digital systems are expensive.
We use them because they add convenience for the citizens since they eliminate queues, but it would actually be much cheaper to do the whole process on paper.
I’m not sure why America ever installed digital voting machines, but I can’t see any reason to do so. Especially not some that don’t leave a paper trail.
I think modern games absolutely do harm, I don’t think they should really be called games either, because they are build for addiction to make you play their built in slot machines.
My children never had smart devices because nobody under 15 should ever touch a smart device. They grew up much healthier than their peers and I think it was the strict rules on technology that did most of the work.
I’m not against technology or smart devices by any means, but it’s hard to use both in a healthy manner and children are really bad at making the right decision.
I mean, you wouldn’t give your kid free reign in the candy store, so why would you do it on their smartphone?
Like SCRUM, we use kanban boards to handle projects, but a lot of our projects are so small that one guy can build the project in a week or two. Like a registration form for scheduling phone calls, you need a front end form, a backend api and integration to outlook. The first time we build one it took longer, but now we can have one up and running in a week or two.
We place that on our kanban board and we talk about it SCRUM style, but it’s not it’s own project and it’s not broken in to every step of the SCRUM methodology either, because if we did that it would probably add a week of agile project management.
But since we’re not doing that it means that we’re not agile or using SCRUM, because we’ve bent it to our needs and broken it’s golsen dogmas.
Now I give quite a few management talks on this, and as soon as you admit that you’ve broken agile to make it fit, a line of others forms to confess. Because I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone outside of academia or extremely large tech projects that actually followed any of the agile methodologies to the letter.
So agile is just as silly as waterfall, maybe even more so because it turned out that the analysis part of waterfall is often still extremely useful if you’re mixing your tech with HR stuff like benefit realisation, and let’s face it, who in digitisation isn’t? I mean, we’re digitizing to increase efficiency after all, and nothing screams benefit realisation more than that.
As far as newer techs go, well, how many have COBOL already outlived? It’ll outlive a lot of them yet.
HN is a great place for FOMO, but reality is often different. In my country 90% of everything is run on JAVA, C# or PHP. Front ends are typically something a little more modern like angular or react, but you won’t get a front end job if you can’t also do C#, JAVA or PHP.
If all these new techs really mattered, you wouldn’t still be working on COBOL after all. And you can always play around with them on your free time.
I mean WASM is a fun example, if it picks up, then everyone who’s spent the past decade ignoring JS won’t have missed out of anything, because they can just build their web app with WASM.
If you want to try something different, that’s another story, but don’t take a pay cut that you don’t have to because if FOMO.
Type safety isn’t worth having more complex prototypes, and having to keep up with both JS and Tyoescript, for us.
It’s very easy and forgiving to do a proof of concept though, because it integrates so easily into your existing code base.
Just be sure it actually adds real value and isn’t something you do for hype.
I’d certainly utilise it if we were building something as complex as VSC, but we aren’t, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that typescript isn’t all positive gains but that it also has downsides.
We used to work with, first WPF then web forms and later MVC with razor, and we very quickly bought Telerik because the standard UI components in .Net are horrible.
Aside from that I’ve worked with JAVA I can’t recall what we used before FX but both were terrible.
In the JS CSS environment I can literally make an interface that doesn’t look like ass by simply using the standard setup in a front end with very few lines of code.
I guess a think like Blazor.net might make wasm competitive, but unlike JS, that requires Microsoft not to drop it in a year because they don’t have the OS movement JS does.
I understand why people dislike the package he’ll of modern JS, but so far, it’s proven itself to be just as trustworthy as any curated library.
On the other hand you’re not tied down in JS. When Microsoft made entity they wanted people to use it, even though it’s fucking awful. In JS you can very easily replace a component if something better comes along. That’s a great strength.
Graphql has been really instrumental for us for instance. We operate apps in low connective environments, so being able to only transfer what is needed is really great.
Graphql isn’t JS only, but it takes very little time and effort to setup an Apollo, graphql and vue app, and it’s got very few issues. The .Net integration of graphql is still a 3rd party library that doesn’t really work that well and isn’t easy to use.
That’s the thing with JS, it’s just really productive in the real world.
Blazor.net looks really productive, but it’s only productive when you don’t need it to do something Microsoft hasn’t thought of, and it’s the only WASM integration that I’ve seen that is even remotely competitive with JS.
Hell when we were still building interfaces in .Net we paid a subscription to use Telerik on the frontend because the standard .net stuff is absolutely terrible.
VS is great too, but it’s performance is really, really, terrible when your documents and settings directory is on one network drive and your codebase is on another. Not exactly VS’s fault, but it’s an ide for enterprise that can’t function with the most basic enterprise drive setup?
VSC, the electron app on the other hand doesn’t give two shits.
People usually tell me VSC is the one off unicorn. But isn’t discord better than team speak and ventrilo? Isn’t slack excellent?
I don’t think sunk cost is a negative when people are building better tools with it.
I’m not a UXer, never was, and I moved into management long before programs even got pretty so I’ve never even had to pick up.
Yet I can make a pretty web application with vue with minimal efforts. Add stuff like graphql, and wasm looks so ridiculously old aged before it’s even born.
Of course that kind of defeatist attitude is silly, and I’m looking forward to see where wasm goes in the coming years, because if people just gave up, I wouldn’t have been able to make a pretty app in vue either.
All those resources have been a complete waste so far, and they’ve entirely been spent on blockchain because of hype. That is extremely bad, because all those resources could have been thrown at something useful.
For whatever reason blockchain has been extremely resilient to reality. It’s almost been a decade, and we’ve yet to see anything purposeful come our way. It’s still on Gartners list for 2019 though, so I guess we’ll spent another year burning money.
It’d be a clear advantage if they were all build to be systems, but it would be even better if they were build to be systems that coexist with each other.
I wish suppliers would ask us what hardware we operate, what services and API we’d want them to interact with, and, made plans for what we have to do when their system eventually dies. Because right now, everything is build for specific purposes, and it’s impossible to make most things work together.
So you’ll have one program that handles finances for sick people. Another that handles networking to companies and businesses that help get sick people back on track. Another program which keeps track on the wellbeing on families with sick members. A while range of medical programs. And none of them work together, run on the same hardware or has any form of uniform support solution, so we have to waste thousands of nan hours simply making sure every program has the data it needs.
It’s silly, but every developmenthouse seem to suck equally at making non silo sollutuons.
Until that I can recommend Bill Gates lists, it’s a really great resource for modern international works. Some of the recommendations in gates notes are very humanitarian, but others, like Sapiens, have made it into the book shelf of most cultivated people I know and I only read it because it was recommended in gates notes.