Ask HN: Where can one learn about boring web development?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
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  • curriculum

    The open curriculum for learning web development

  • microblog

    The microblogging application developed in my Flask Mega-Tutorial series. This version maps to the 2024 Edition of the tutorial.

    This might be a good starting point:

    The Flask Mega Tutorial https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial...

    I’m guessing there’s something similar for Ruby on Rails and Laravel.

    For persistence, consider Litestream/SQLite. Or just good old PostgreSQL. Or MariaDB.

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • fastapi

    FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production

    The Flask mega-tutorial is great - but I would recommend looking at fast Api today, rather than flask. That will in general only give you an Api though - you'd typically add on a pure js/ts front-end or something:

    https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/

    Or look at Django - for something more full-featured in python.

  • Nuxt.js

    Discontinued Nuxt is an intuitive and extendable way to create type-safe, performant and production-grade full-stack web apps and websites with Vue 3. [Moved to: https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt]

    Start with Nuxt / Next and work your way to HTML. I say this after being a web developer since 2002.

    You will figure out what you need and what you do not very quickly this way.

    It won't be easy, but you'll end up with the skills you need in modern web dev.

    And be thankful you did not have to spend a decade dealing with cross browser issues. You have it very easy today.

    https://nuxtjs.org/ (I prefer Vue).

    https://nextjs.org/

  • Next.js

    The React Framework

    Start with Nuxt / Next and work your way to HTML. I say this after being a web developer since 2002.

    You will figure out what you need and what you do not very quickly this way.

    It won't be easy, but you'll end up with the skills you need in modern web dev.

    And be thankful you did not have to spend a decade dealing with cross browser issues. You have it very easy today.

    https://nuxtjs.org/ (I prefer Vue).

    https://nextjs.org/

  • htmx

    </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

    I'm not aware of exactly what you're looking for, but I think such a resource would be very valuable. Unfortunately, modern web development has almost completely eschewed simplicity. I can offer some leads, though.

    This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at https://grugbrain.dev/ which is written by the guy behind https://htmx.org/ -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity.

    This recent talk from Djangocon "React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product" might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GObi93tjZI

    Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at https://workers.tools/. The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts "no JS is shipped to the client by default". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering.

    The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for "the modern Rails".

    As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's a lot easier to use them than manage it yourself. And with the new serverless stuff, we're actually pretty close to how CGI on shared hosting used to be where you could upload a script and not have to worry about the gory details so much.

  • fresh

    The next-gen web framework.

    Also, I suppose it's the opposite of boring - but I always liked the pragmatic streak in the deno project - it may very well be that fresh isn't a bad place to start?

    https://fresh.deno.dev/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • learn-x-by-doing-y

    🛠️ Learn a technology X by doing a project - Search engine of project-based learning

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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