Web developers today are a spoiled lot.

I consider myself as an absolute beginner in the web development world, but I am truly amazed at the things I can do today with free / minimal cost infrastructure. The system automates everything except me - I am that stupid man in the middle.

Despite stupidity, I can and want to build truly great stuff for my human brothers and sisters (and then some for the animals in you, for Alexa, Cortana, the robots and so forth).

Unfortunately for me, the desire to build something and going where none has gone before in web-development does not push me to greatness, but brings me to a standstill in the middle of an Indian National Highway. There are vehicles, people, animals, insects all over the place. I keep looking around casually rather than moving forward. Those interesting ‘things’ distracting me can be structurally organized as below.

Javascript

JS and the million frameworks are like Deepavali (“not Diwali” - I am from South of India). They keep burstin’ and cracklin’ - I keep lookin’.

I had exposure to JQuery, and can code some of React, but I am too lazy to put everything together to result in a cohesive application.

So, I kept jumping from Meteor, AllCountJS (yes, it exists - lookup), Adonis, Feather and through Vue, React, Preact, and the like.

Rest of World - Languages and Platforms

The problem or however you want to call it is - once you start exploring, you don’t stop at Javascript frameworks. A brave explorer goes forward and explores everything else - ReasonML (‘hello world’), Flutter, Elixir, Django and even Go (‘take performance seriously’, someone said).

The exploration takes time, and the frustration of not “shipping” something makes your heart heavy.

Low/No Code

The frustration can lead one to low-code / no-code platforms - not many are within reach of an individual. But things like Radzen, or platforms like Bubble sure excited me once. The lack of flexibility to do magic put me back to doing my own thing after a couple of months - no offense to the said platforms. I am sure they are wonderful, but my perceived restrictions grew stronger by the day.

Hello, PHP

After all this, and after many years of not “coding” PHP, I go back to PHP. (Wordpress development alone does not count towards being active in the PHP).

Laravel is my latest interest in PHP.

• Laravel can be deployed on cheap hosts without me worrying about nodemon, Docker, monitoring threads and so forth. To a large extent, it keeps alive and does its thing (when it doesn’t - I am keeping down frustrations here)
• Keep following tutorials on Laracasts, YouTube, and the manual - you will get it eventually
• Convention just takes the mind off “how best to organize things” and instead put things on “what other things I need to build”
• I am aware that Adonis and Meteor represent this world in Javascript. But my quest to take ready made components, get help quickly, and get things working faster did not quite make as much progress

So, have I found nirvana?

Nope.

I see Laravel as helping me to get the first ten web applications out in the next six months (I will have updates here!). I will in the meantime keep a close watch on the Javascript world and the no/low-code world.

PS: But again, who knows? I see a shiny thing in React Hooks, Vue or Svelte, I will jump there for a quick exploration that may easily take the next two months. Just saying.