I remember when "Full Stack" meant HTML, CSS, a bit of PHP, and a SQL database.

Now, to build a simple CRUD app, I need:

-A framework for the frontend.

-A meta-framework for the backend.

-An ORM that abstractly talks to a headless DB.

-An auth provider because I’m told not to roll my own.

-Edge functions for "performance."

-A 2GB node_modules folder.

I spent 4 hours yesterday configuring a build pipeline instead of writing a single feature. When did we decide that "simple" wasn't good enough anymore? Is anyone else just building "boring" monoliths and actually enjoying their job?

EDIT: I’m blown away by the response—250k views in 48 hours. It’s clear I’ve hit a nerve. After reading through 400+ comments, I’ve realized the core of our collective frustration: We’ve stopped being Engineers and started being highly-paid Librarians.

Real engineering is about understanding the medium—the DOM, the Network, the Browser. But "Seniority" in 2026 has been downgraded to just memorizing the quirks of ephemeral libraries. If your expertise depends on a framework that didn't exist 5 years ago and won't matter 5 years from now, you aren't a Senior Engineer; you’re a specialized technician for a proprietary product.

The real "Senior" move isn't mastering the next abstraction—it's having the guts to build on the platform itself. Stop assembling Lego sets and start building software again.

Some freelancer I know really thought AI was about to carry his whole career. Bro thought he could just get ChatGPT and Cursor to build websites for him and even get an AI running his python code for autmation and he simply just collects the bag.

A month later bro has 10+ customers waiting for there completed website and the AI's have no idea what's going wrong, and ofc he doesnt know what could be the problem so he's gotta return the money and accept he's lost 1 month of his life.

Just wanna remind y’all AI can be a good tool, even a great one. But you shouldn’t put your whole career on it. Unless your dream job is doing customer support for refunds

Everybody says “WebSockets are overkill for turn-based games, just hit / move with REST.” I believed that while building a 3-D chess app (Three.js + Node) and quickly paid the price.

Two months in, players reported ghost moves showing up out of order. We were polling every two seconds, which worked out to about 25 000 requests an hour with only 200 users.

After switching to WebSockets the numbers told the story:

Average requests per match dropped from 1800 to 230

P95 latency fell from 420 ms to 95 ms

EC2 bandwidth went from \$84 a month to \$52

“Out-of-turn” bug reports fell from 37 a week to 3

Yes, the setup was trickier JWT auth plus socket rooms cost us an extra day. Mobile battery drain? We solved it by throttling the ping interval to 25s. The payoff is that the turn indicator now updates instantly, so no more “Is it my move?” Slack pings.

My takeaway: if perceived immediacy is part of the fun, WebSockets pay for themselves even in a turn based game.

Cheap web hosting, best budget providers?

Heyy all, need some advice. I feel that I'm paying too much for hosting, so looking for a cheaper decent quality alternative. It’s hard to tell which web hosting providers are actually good. Appreciate any recommendations.

Pretty much when AI was released to the world 3 years ago the phone stopped ringing. I used to get 3-5 calls a week prior to that to interview and it always kept me employed over the past 30 years. Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm in Silicon Valley.

Over the last few months, I’ve shifted how I use AI in my dev workflow. When I first got into it, I treated it like a vending machine: input problem, output code. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it spit out garbage, and I’d waste more time debugging than if I’d written it myself.

Now I treat it more like a junior dev sitting beside me. I narrate my thought process, ask questions, sketch pseudo-code, and bounce ideas off of it. The shift is subtle but huge.

Instead of asking "write me a function that does X," I now ask:

“Would a generator pattern make sense here?”

“How would you test this if it had a race condition?”

“What edge cases am I missing?”

Weirdly, I’ve also started learning faster. Because instead of just copying code, I’m seeing different patterns, getting explanations, and then adapting stuff manually. I don’t rely on it to get me to the finish line, but it’s great at breaking inertia when I’m stuck.

Anyone else evolving how they use AI day to day? I’m curious how this looks for folks in different stacks (I’m mostly working in Python + Rust).

Hostinger: hosting review (and let's be honest)

I’ve been looking at Hostinger as a hosting provider and wanted to hear what people think. On paper, it looks like a solid budget-friendly option, but I’ve noticed a few drawbacks that make me hesitant:

• Limited Phone Support: From what I can see, support is mainly through live chat and email. There’s no phone option, which can be annoying if you want to talk to someone for urgent issues.

• Multi-Year Commitment: The introductory pricing is pretty reasonable, but the rates jump up quite a lot if you don’t lock into a multi-year plan which I'm hesitant about.

• Lack of cPanel: It seems that they use their own custom control panel (hPanel) which I think can cause some frustrations for me since I've only been using cPanel and used to that.

What do you see as the biggest drawbacks with Hostinger?

How would you compare it to alternatives like Bluehost or SiteGround?

What is the best web hosting for small business websites?

I'm looking for web hosting for small businesses. The requirements are good performance and easy to scale. Which hosting is good for small businesses on WordPress? What are your recommendations?

I hear a lot about AI but mostly from Vibe, Junior and Mid level developers but for Devs that can already build full stack apps without any help what is AI useful for?

I rarely used it for some simple code. It does the job quickly but I hate it because I have to understand every piece of the code which is annoying. I read that it causes bugs that would be difficult to fix. Also the AI-made designs are all similar which I think is limiting. I prefer coding everything myself.

What do you think? should I change my attitude? are there a lot of people who are like me?

My team and I have project idea we've been working on and we decided to check domain availability for it. We used domains.google.com and namemesh.com to check if it was available.

The name was available on both sites when we searched. Within 15 minutes of searching for the name and when we were ready to purchase it, the domain was not available anymore.

The new registrar for the domain is meshdigital.com which belongs to heg.com and is a business partner of godaddy.com.

This is the most shady and unscrupulous use of a domain search that I've seen as a web developer.

If you have a domain idea please avoid name namemesh.com they will steal your domain.

I’ve been wondering how most developers are working these days. Do you still write code completely by hand, or do you use AI tools to speed things up?

If you use AI, which tools are your go-to? (like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Replit Ghostwriter, etc.)

Curious to hear how AI is changing your workflow is it a full replacement or just an assistant?

What is the best website builder?

I want to make a website for a small business that my friend owns. I’ve played around with html, css, and javascript before, but am not confident enough to build anything serious or real. So am thinking to use a website builder but not sure where to start.

WordPress, Framer, Webflow, Lovable, Claude, etc. etc. There are so many website builders out there. I don’t know which to use, please give me some guidance or advice.

AI is speeding things up. Frameworks are abstracting everything. And beginner/intermediate devs are skipping the hard parts not because they’re lazy, but because the tools make it feel like they don’t need to learn them.

No real debugging. No understanding of the DOM. Just copy-paste, deploy, and hope the AI was right.

We’re building sites that look fine but break under pressure. We’re shipping code we don’t fully understand. And we’re getting confident before we’re competent.

Drop your dev wake-up calls, your “I thought I knew what I was doing” moments, or the one thing you wish you’d learned earlier.

It seems like most of my coworkers prefer working on backend tasks vs. frontend. Many also seem fearful of being pigeon holed into frontend tasks. At my company, we have a UI/UX group so frontend devs simply implement the designs the UI team "draws" for lack of a better term.

What is normal to pay for web hosting cost? (for a small website like blog, portfolio, or small business website, that is using wordpress). Have hosting prices gone up? What’s a reasonable monthly cost?

I’m trying to get an idea of what people usually pay for web hosting. When you search online, prices are all over place. What are you paying and what kind of site do you have?

Please share your IONOS review and hosting experience

Thinking about trying out IONOS. I’ve seen some people swear by them, so they've got a loyal following. Anyone tried their hosting services? The most popular types of hosting that people seem to sign up for are:

1. Web Hosting

2. VPS Hosting

3. WordPress Hosting

Edit: there are also some negative reviews of IONOS (seems to be the case for all hosting companies). So, I did some more research and reading forum threads to see if I could get some kind of general consensus. I made a pro-con list based on what I could find and the most popular answers were:

Pros:

• Value for money: Excellent

• Tech & Scalability: Great

• Customer Service: Excellent

• Only 1 year commitment (while other hosting providers require a 3-4 year commitment)

Cons:

• User Interface: not as modern as other hosting providers.

• Renewal Price: increases after 1st year (although that's the same for all hosting providers)

Every time someone warns about tech debt, what they're really saying is: we're about to slap something together that'll haunt the next developer. It's not debt - debt implies you planned to pay it back. This is just accumulation.

I've seen codebases where the "quick fix" from 2019 is now the critical path nobody dares touch. The reasoning? Always the same: deadlines, client pressure, "we'll refactor later." That later never comes. Instead, you get developers whispering "I'm afraid to touch that file" during standup.

The real kicker is how we've normalized this. Oh, we have technical debt, just like every other shop. Cool story. What we actually have is a mess created by pretending speed and quality are compatible when you're cutting corners.

What's your most ridiculous encounter with so-called "tech debt" that was really just... bad decisions stacked on bad decisions?

Trying to figure out how this site on Pinterest was built.

The whole background feels like one continuous animated scene as you scroll

Is this one long mp4 controlled by scroll position or multiple mp4 videos for each section?

Been a web dev for over 25 years. Masters graduate school educated. For the life of me I can't get a job. It's been six months, over 400+ applied, and only six interviews. Family with three boys, rent, and wife's retail job can't sustain us. I've started looking into jobs outside web dev, even outside IT. Looking at warehouse, grocery, even USPS, it's getting desperate.

What on earth do I put on my resume!?! Do I leave it as is, or do I slim it down to only show my education. I have no experience outside webdev/IT. On the resume do I just put education and skills like Office 365 and Adobe Suite...? Looks so empty. Funny, but not funny. Thank you.

I've been trying to build a page using the HTML editor, and it just keeps creating more and more bizarre problems.

If you add line breaks between nested DOM elements, the page will not render those inner nested DOM elements. That's never happened with regular html, PHP or react apps.

Next, even if you don't add line breaks, WordPress will start adding <p> tags all over your code and break the entire page and prevent it from loading.

For what? Why can't you just let me build the page man? Why do they even have a HTML editor if they're going to add all this functionality on top of it?

Are there any self-taught web developers here who can share their journey? I'm curious to know if it's truly possible to land a real job in web development without a degree. I’d really appreciate hearing your insights and experiences!

I’m 23 and currently grinding for my final exams at the end of this month.

​While I'm sitting here memorizing syntax, data structures, and the "proper" way to handle state management for my grades, I open social media and see the industry sprinting in a totally different direction. It feels like every day there's a new AI tool (Cursor, v0, etc.) that automates the exact things I'm stressing over for these exams.

​It’s creating a weird disconnect for me. On one hand, I know the fundamentals are supposed to be important. On the other, it feels like I’m learning to build a car by hand with a wrench while everyone else is suddenly driving Ferraris they built with a prompt.

​For the experienced devs here: Is this just "exam season anxiety," or is the way we learn web development fundamentally breaking?

​I’m trying to figure out if I should just keep my head down and ace the traditional stuff, or if I’m going to graduate next month already behind the curve because I didn't spend this time learning how to integrate AI into my workflow.

​How are you guys balancing the "old way" of coding with these new tools?

It feels like every year a new framework or library shows up and quickly becomes the “must-use” tool in web development. Sometimes they live up to the hype, but other times they feel more like a passing trend. In your opinion, which framework or library do you think is the most overhyped right now, and why? Do you see it fading out soon, or do you think it will eventually prove its worth?