Haha, I had the same experience going from scientific work in grad school to big tech. The phrase “a solution in search of a problem” comes to mind. The additional complexity does create new problems however, which is fine for devops, because now we have a recursive system of ensuring job security.

It blows my mind what is involved in creating a simple web app nowadays compared to when I was a kid in the mid-2000s. Do kids even do that nowadays? I’m not sure I’d even want to get started with all the complexity involved.

Creating a simple web app isn’t that hard.

If you want to use a framework The React tutorials from Traversy media are pretty good. You can even do cross platform into mobile app with frameworks like React Native or Flutter if you want iOS/Android native apps.

Vite has been a godsend for React/Vue. It’s no longer the circus it was in the mid 2010s. Google’s monopoly has made things easier for web devs. No more babel or polyfill or createReactApp.

People do still avoid frameworks and use raw HTML/CSS/Javascript. HTMX has made sever fetches a lot easier.

You probably want a decent CSS framework for reponsive design. Everyone used to use minimalist ones like Tailwimd have become more popular.

If you need a backend and want to do something simple you can use BaaS (Backend as a service) platforms like Firebase. Otherwise setting up a NodeJS server with some SQL or KV store like SQLLite or MongoDB isn’t too difficult

CI/CD systems exist to streamline testing and deployment for large complex apps. But for individual hobbyist projects it’s not worth it.

> I'm kinda used to it now, but I'm not convinced it's any better.

It’s demonstrably worse.

> The base knowledge of POSIX/Linux/whatever was almost completely useless.

Guarantee you, 99% of the engineering team there doesn’t have that base knowledge to start with, because of:

> There are so many layers of abstraction now that I'm not sure anybody truly understands it all.

Everything is constantly on fire, because everything is a house of cards made up of a collection of XaaS, all of which are themselves houses of cards written by people similarly clueless about how computers actually operate.

I hate all of it.

> I'm not convinced it's any better.

Your Jenkins experience is more valuable and worth replicating when you get the opportunity.

We're doing the same, but replacing the bash script with Dagger.

Once you get on Dagger, you can turn your CI into minimal Dagger invocations and write the logic in the language of your choice. Runs the same locally and in automation

Would love to see a more detailed write-up on this way of using Dagger.

The idea is a common pattern among Dagger users, but you can do the same with bash scripts, python, or any entrypoint. It's more of a CI ethos, and for me Dagger is an implementation detail.

I personally hold Dagger a bit different from most, by writing a custom CLI and using the Dagger Go SDK directly. This allows you to do more host level commands, as everything in a Dagger session runs in a container (builds and arbitrary commands).

I've adopted the mono/megarepo organization and have a pattern that also includes CUE in the solution. Starting to write that up here: https://verdverm.com/topics/dev/dx

it's just common sense, which is unfortunately lost with sloppy devs. People go straight from junior dev to SRE without learning engineering principles through building products first.

I feel like more time is spent getting CI working these days than on the actual applications.

Between that and upgrading for security patches. Developing user impacting code is becoming a smaller and smaller part of software development.