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Thomas Hansen
Thomas Hansen

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Here's for creating CRUD apps manually

When I started working as a professional software developer we had to implement algorithms and data structures ourselves. Even an administration app created for back office usage typically required knowledge about Big O notation, data structures, and optimisation techniques. Even basic stuff like jQuery didn't exist, and the first chapters in a good C++ book typically taught you how to create a string class. Today we've got List<T>.Sort, Postgres, and Angular, and imagining manually creating a string class today for anything but academic purposes is madness.

My business is CRUD, literally. In fact, I've got a company around the axiom of CRUD. We're a handful of employees, we've got some VC funding, and we literally "do CRUD" 100% of our time one way or another. Of course, this implies having to think of a lot of other things, such as authentication, authorisation, security, etc - But the basic axiom around which we evolve is that life is too short to having to manually create CRUD apps.

Don't do manually what the machine can do better automatically

The above is such an obvious truth it's impossible to argue against.

I feel a bit sorry for Chris Rock and Will Smith. Chris made a distasteful joke, and Will over-reacted. However, when you've got passion and love for something, "loosing perspective" for a minute or two is easy. There are roughly 30 million software developers in the world today. Combined we're being paid 1 trillion dollars every single year in salary. Imagine how much further we could evolve as a specie and an industry collectively if none of us repeated ourselves in code?

Don't waste time implementing List<T>.Sort, let your library or framework developers do it. They'll probably outperform whatever you could possibly achieve in the space, regardless of how many times you were taught QuickSort in university. Don't waste time manually modifying the DOM using jQuery, use Angular, React, or Vue. The authors of these tools have probably anticipated any problem you might possibly experience in the space. And don't create CRUD apps (manually), because I can guarantee you we're better at it than you.

Notice, I obviously don't condone violence, and I don't think it's OK to make distasteful jokes about other people's wives or partners. Neither will I punch you for manually creating CRUD apps. But in a way you're punching yourself if you do this. Every time somebody finds a way to automate that which you're manually doing today, this creates an opportunity. An opportunity to innovate and move the world collectively forward. Such opportunities makes the world a better place one way or another. I guess what I'm getting at is as follows ...

Use the best tools available for whatever problem you are currently facing

For CRUD, that just so happens to be us

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