It’s time for a new general discussion thread! Hot takes, recommendations, questions, cautionary tales, all of it is welcome here.
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
I am keeping this post very brief as I am really not feeling very well at the moment. So, here are some super brief impressions on what I watched this past week:
Just as a meta aside, I have been toying around with stuff for future versions of the voting stuff we just did for the awards and the async nature of web stuff is really breaking my brain. I am so used to writing scripts and stuff for work that just runs a bunch of data cleaning and analysis sequentially and I sit there while it thinks until it spits out the results.
That kind of thing just doesn’t work when you try to do things in a browser without making you constantly think that things are broken. Making this issue worse is that one of the api’s I am trying to integrate (animethemes.moe) is pretty slow to respond, usually taking ~0.5-1 second per query. So, I am being forced to learn async stuff and I kind of hate it…
There’s some things you can’t really avoid dealing with that stuff for, but if it doesn’t really need to be a dynamic interaction with the service, you may be able to just write a script that runs on your server (either once or periodically) to download what you need as a batch, and then serve static results based on that to your users. It’s not only easier to implement when you can use that technique, but the UX is often better that way too…
I remember beating my head against the wall working through the details of Promises in JS a couple years ago when I needed to figure out how to trigger certain pieces of logic only after all of a large batch of slow, dynamic results were fetched – which the user would often want to interrupt and adjust as partial results came in… so, I know what you mean.
Yeah, I think this is what I am going to do for the most part. Especially when dealing with the slow api responses, I can just make all the requests in a background script and save what I need to a local database. It’s just text at the end of the day, so even a couple thousand entries is nothing.
Haven’t really gotten a handle on these yet. I have almost exclusively worked with python and R in the past, so dipping a toe into JS has been challenging. I haven’t gotten too far into frontend stuff yet, but think I might try to just avoid it as much as possible through flask+htmx. Some JS is going to be unavoidable though I think since I do want certain things to be interactable.
You guys have just reminded me why I no longer try to do any kind of website work. 🙄 😭