Software that lasts, a story
So I wanted to tell a story about software. I've just been thinking about this. There's kind of a debate on, you know, there's some talk on Twitter and on in the h
Speaker 2:t m x kind of,
Lazarus:world about design and and kind of old school designs, how
Speaker 2:it was much more, you
Lazarus:know, skeuomorphic is maybe not the right word, but things had kind of shapes and shadows, and it wasn't all flat like it
Speaker 2:is now. But and I think that that's true. There
Lazarus:is something nice about an interface where you can actually sort of tell what's what, rather than just kind of having everything be flat, and you sort of have to guess, you know, is this, an input, or is this a button, but bigger than that. Software nowadays does move really quickly. There's new versions. You have to kind of like keep this stack of dependencies in order, and I'm not talking about all software, but I'm talking about kind of the general direction of the web right now. And I think this is kind of a lot of people, myself included, have the little bit of, fatigue about that.
Lazarus:So I just want to tell a story about this is about my father-in-law, and has you know, he he is an architect, and he's in his seventies, but he's an active working architect. Really brilliant at what he does, and and he's gone through it a bunch of times with me, just kind of looking over some of his designs. I've been in some of the houses that he's worked with clients and and had built. And he has a way of really matching the house or the updates, whatever needs to happen to the land and to the location. And he just thinks about those kind of things, and thinks about matching the neighborhood, and, he's won awards in the past for this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So he's an architect, and he uses software. He didn't always, but, you know, he
Lazarus:used to draw by hand, but he uses
Speaker 2:software. Now there's a lot of architecture software, and there's a lot of, like, new stuff, AI stuff. The software he uses is on a floppy disk, and it's called SoftPlan. The company still exists, but it's on a floppy disk.
Lazarus:What he does it runs in DOS. What he does, he also has a physical key that plugs into an old computer. The computer runs windows 98, but primarily it runs DOS. Once you set the boot disk to be the floppy drive, it will load soft plan directly from his soft plan floppy. And he has a folder that contains all his work, which is separate from the floppy.
Lazarus:The floppy is just the software. So I just want to like think about Now I've just been thinking about that. This is you know, how big is a floppy disk? How much space does that have on it? This is software that has been running you know, he has a he's had a successful career as an architect.
Lazarus:He works for himself, and he's provided for his family, and had a ton of success, just kind of building things for clients. He's run his own business. You know, I'm not exactly sure for how long now, but probably 30 years. And it's all been using. You know, he's gone probably tried a different few different things, but the primary thing he uses is soft plan on floppy disk.
Speaker 2:So I
Lazarus:think this is just a reminder that, you know, so and so let me just say what this program is. I mean, this is an fully functional architecture program. You can print out you know, he's got it hooked up to a large scale, a large scale printer, laser printer, so that he can print out his plans from all different angles. He's able to draw these architectural renderings, these architectural drawings from all these different angles, and, you know, really build and design. And he's been using the software long enough that he's like, you know, it's like watching a master at work.
Lazarus:And the software is extremely fast. There's like, you press a key. It's DOS software. You can move use the mouse. It's not like this is not all like, you know, keyboard based.
Lazarus:But a lot of it is keyboard based. There's a lot of hot keys, you know, f 11,
Speaker 2:f one through f 11. Each one does something different down at the
Lazarus:bottom of the screen, and it is so fast. You just hit something, it happens. There's no delay. Nothing. It's immediate, And he's tried several times to go into the one of these new chief architects and take the classes and do all this stuff.
Lazarus:And one of the things he says is, you know, they have some bells and whistles, but the output is not that good. That's the number one. But also it's just slow. All these things are just slow, you know, maybe they give you a good starting point, they can sort of give you some defaults, but every time you click on something, every time you do something, it's slow. And just think about that.
Lazarus:This program he's using is running off of a floppy disk. It was created probably 1994. And it's still working and it's still faster using running on an old computer from the late nineties. Not only is it still working, the program, he can draw in it faster, the clicks are faster, the interface is faster, the interface is clear. I took a look at it.
Lazarus:I helped, you know, was helping him just kind of, there was an issue with running out of storage and I helped them look through the application just to see what was going on. And it's unbelievable, you know. This is software that has sustained a lifetime, a career, and it still works. It's still fast. It's still good.
Lazarus:He doesn't need to download the updates or change his OS or, you know, do all these kind of things that you can do. Of course SoftPlan has new versions, new updates, the new stuff. But just the fact that this software can be so good and so fast and still work after all this time, you know, on these old computers. You know, the problem is probably the more likely thing to happen is the hardware breaking down than the software. And that's what I this is like my goal.
Lazarus:This is my goal with development right now. I think this is the direction I'm moving. I want to go back to making things like that.
Speaker 2:I've messed around with a
Lazarus:lot of different stuff. I think this is what sort of pulled me into the h t m x world and interest is this kind of return to simplicity. Focusing on speed, I think that's actually a big deal when you, you know, there's a lot of stuff you can do to make things feel fast even when you're over a network, you know. I build stuff over a network so that's fine, you know. Things can be over a network.
Lazarus:I'm not building local apps like this, you know, soft plan. But I want it to feel similar. I want it to feel like when you click something something happens, you know. And this is a lot what brought a lot of people to s p a's, but, I, you know, you can achieve that without an SPA. It's all about feedback.
Lazarus:You know, haptic feedback on your phone is that little buzz or whatever you get when you click something, or the little sound you get. And that helps. That sort of stuff makes it feel like something is happening. That you can accomplish that easily with h tmx or JavaScript, you know, whatever you're using, alpine, you don't have to wait for the server request and even if you do have to wait for the server request it's usually pretty quick. So I just think this is one of the things about h t m x, you know.
Lazarus:If you take that file, that
Speaker 2:h t m x, javascript include, You can
Lazarus:you put it as an include and link to it if you want, or you can just download it and add it to your software. Add it to your website, so that it pulls it locally. The functions that are in there are not going to change in 5 years, 10 years. You could build a site that makes you money, or makes somebody else money, or just makes someone's life easier. And it could sit there for 5, 10 years on the web and not need to be changed and not break and still just run smoothly.
Lazarus:And this is this is what I want. I want to be able to build that kind of tool where you're not spending all your time just updating for the sake of updating. Updating so it feels new and shiny, right? I want to build software that is gonna stand the test of time. That actually is gonna benefit me because I'm building the software, I own the software.
Lazarus:If I were getting paid to make all the updates, you know, fine, I get that. There's kind of like a perverse relationship between, having to do a bunch of regular updates and getting paid. And like I don't want software developers to not get paid. I'm a big fan of that. But as a business owner, building my own products either for my own use or for my client's use or for, you know, my use to sell as a SaaS.
Lazarus:I don't want to be spending all that time on maintenance and upkeep and changing versions and updating this and updating that and checking the dependencies and changing the OS and, you know, or the version, the Ubuntu install, like all these things. I don't wanna have to think about that because that's time wasted when you could be developing something new, when you could be adding more features, when you could be doing those other things. So tools like h t m x, and and you know there's been a big thing with Levels. Io. He's he's Peter Levels.
Lazarus:Probably if you're on Twitter you probably know about him for various reasons. He initially was the like index dot PHP guy. His entire apps are all in index dot PHP. He probably still does that. You know, he's expanded over the years, now he does use git, which is like crazy that he didn't use it.
Speaker 2:He was against it for so long. But he
Lazarus:runs his own sites and makes a ton of money, has like 5 or 6 different giant sites, and you know people are always like wow how do you do this? It's impossible, it's amazing, just one person runs all these sites and and they're able to make, you know, 100 of 1,000 of dollars
Speaker 2:a month or whatever. And one
Lazarus:of the things he does is he doesn't use frameworks. He doesn't use all these kind of crazy new things. He hand rolls everything and he thinks about stuff like that, stuff he does, he's not using even like Laravel which I love. The Laravel versions when they put out a new version you have to kinda keep up with that or else you fall behind. When you fall behind some stuff isn't supported, some new stuff you can't do.
Lazarus:So there is a cost to all the convenience that comes with the sort of big framework mentality, and this is the cost. I'm not willing to pay that cost when it comes to front end frameworks. Like anybody who's done that, who's paid that cost, I hope you're getting paid to pay the cost of doing the work. I hope you're getting paid a lot of money, because that's great, that's a good reason to do it. But if you're running your own business and you're spending your time updating, you know, because this dependency broke on some, one of the several 100 JavaScript includes that this like house of cards that is built upon, to make just to install your hello world kind of thing.
Lazarus:If you're spending time on that, you know, that's not that's not gonna be profitable if that's your own time you're playing with. I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe for some people it is. But what I want to build is something if you go down to the lower level build it with these kind of building blocks, and h t m x is one of those.
Lazarus:H t m x is this low level hypermedia controls that give you that kind of experience that you want, that's immediate, that gives you that, full power of all your stuff that's on the server, your whole big app, you know. You can access that and you can pull stuff in as you need and that's gonna make things faster. You can deal with thousands and thousands of rows of data in your table, because h t m x is going, you know, and then you can just if you want to edit one you just edit that one single row, send a little javascript ajax using hxget or post, and then pull it back in and reload that one single row. You know, you don't need to reload the whole page every time. You don't need to put every single one of those rows into a virtual memory, you know.
Lazarus:So these things are going to be fast. These tools that you can build with this are going to be fast, and they're going to stand the test of time because h tmx, even if HTMX changes someday, you know, let's say Carson just absolutely loses his mind and goes against everything he believes in for some reason, and makes like a breaking HTMX3 that has all these like components and all this stuff. Even if he does that, h t m x 2, the file that you've downloaded and put locally into your thing, that's still gonna work forever. That's still go that's just JavaScript code that does AJAX requests. It's for your convenience.
Lazarus:So I'm all about building software for the long haul for many reasons. I just think it's better first of all, but also because that's gonna let me spend my time building more software rather than maintaining my existing software. And I'm thinking it long terms. I'm thinking 5 years, 10 years. You start to build up those apps, if each one of those systems is making you a little bit of money and you're and they're not spending a lot of time on them, you know, this is a cumulative effect.
Lazarus:And this is kind of where
Speaker 2:I'm headed, so just wanted
Lazarus:to kind of put something out there. A little story about my father-in-law. He has this kind of system running off a floppy disk somewhere, somewhere out there. Every day he's loading off a floppy disk, building his whole business on this. And he's got, you know, lots of copies of this floppy disk, and it can run on a couple, you know, old devices as long as they can run DOS.
Speaker 2:But it's just it's a goal. It's something
Lazarus:to strive for. And I am realizing how much I appreciate that.
