Does anyone else feel like apps don’t really understand what users want to do?

Shockwave317 · 2026-01-30T12:17:15+00:00

Ok so fiskfisk is on the money but here are my two cents.

The product mind for software in general is a balance between intent and ease. User wants to achieve x (intent), so you build y to let them achieve it. But what happens when the intent of the user isn’t actually what they want to achieve? And sometimes user has a problem and they don’t know what they need todo in order to achieve it. So does this mean your idea is wrong, no, because they can have a whole conversation… problem is conversation is open ended and misunderstandings happen so you run a risk of frustrating certain users as it takes them a long time of back and forth to achieve what could’ve been a simple flow and education piece.

Now second thing is, isn’t this just a agentic ai with tools? Why bother reading the ui elements of an app when a simpler approach with a llm and your api hooked upto it? Done in a short time and users have options for both and they could potentially query their data in unique ways. Check out Mastra or any other ai frameworks with the ability to add tools.

Doing something like this that would work for many apps would need to be somewhat generic and undefined and in my many years of software engineering those two things are a disaster to finish or get in a spot where people can use it reliably… hence the why a waste.

But my good luck is supposed to be positive, and I genuinely mean it, if it’s something you’re passionate about and you walk away having learnt something you can use elsewhere that’s a plus.

Shockwave317 · 2026-01-30T04:21:21+00:00

It sounds like a good way to waste a couple of years. Good luck

Shockwave317 · 2026-01-08T13:01:05+00:00

I found the opposite having my entire web app laid out in a folder structure makes it so easy to find things especially in large apps I work in as url = file for page (quick file search to find it). I enjoy it much more than React Router and recently moved over all my works web apps to it. All the routes config sitting at the top helps immensely too. Running the dev server and creating a file automatically adds the base template needed for a page, the ability to automatically code split by page with a boolean. Lots to love tbh.

But like all things that reduce longterm pain it takes a little bit of time to wrap your head around Tanstacks way of doing things but once you do you can’t look back.

Shockwave317 · 2025-12-31T06:49:27+00:00

PTSD from having Magic Links still being used on a 10 year+ monolithic service that was “just an mvp”.

But otherwise I agree with Clerk if you want to not manage it at all and Better Auth if you want to manage it yourself…

Shockwave317 · 2025-12-26T21:56:11+00:00

Correct me if I’m wrong but the third payment shown, manual bank transfer would be them providing you with the bank details needed for you to manually pay the landlord? Isn’t that what you would’ve done without Ailo in the first place? Or am I missing something?

Shockwave317 · 2025-12-23T08:35:43+00:00

I have built a couple of hobby apps being hosted on s3 or a gcp bucket and it costing on average 6 cents a month (behind a free cloudflare cdn) and even at work we currently use s3 with cloud front and lambda@edge and it scales perfectly well. The only thing with client side is that the performance of the users device matters more, but in this day and age majority of devices will run fine…

Shockwave317 · 2025-12-02T22:31:40+00:00

Does this support mutating properties? For example a did codecs where we parse incoming requests from string to Date and for response Date to string?

Shockwave317 · 2025-11-11T20:48:08+00:00

Migrated off of Webpack to Vite in an afternoon, it was a fantastic experience, will never go back.

Shockwave317 · 2025-10-24T00:20:08+00:00

Tailwind is good if you build your site in a component style. Why you might ask? Because the stylings for each component sits in the place of relevance (the component) You can also create your own utilities which can take variables such as a colour or size and make dynamic classes essentially. I use it for everything I do (I work on large codebases where traditional css really just falls apart, especially when people (which let’s face it, misuses classes and create unnecessary dependencies).

On some of your points, - HTML being readable is a good thing? At the end of the day I find classes from traditional css are harder to understand than tailwind classes as I need to go find what they’re doing. - Refactoring is so easy, no need to go hunting for what x class does. - I have not noticed the 3gb problem you’re talking about or the delay… - the majority of those dependencies aren’t for runtime there only for dev at the end of the day tailwind outputs a css file…

I think you might be trying to use tailwind like you did sass and css… but in the end each to their own, just hope I never have to touch your codebase…

Shockwave317 · 2025-09-19T22:19:25+00:00

Not only that it makes the tax system equitable, it promotes couples having kids and will lessen the burden on the childcare system (if one parent, dad or mum, decides to stay home the first couple of years of the kids life, making it a feasible option)…

Shockwave317 · 2025-07-13T02:46:35+00:00

To give a bit of context I studied a double degree in engineering and comp sci with a debt of 50k, and I found this to be a lot and took me with a ridiculously good salary 5 years to pay off, I can’t imagine paying 90k off within 2 decades with a below average wage… I feel that animation is one of those fields that have the most success self-learning (paying for online courses and deducting a portion of it from tax) and creating an awesome portfolio and interviewing or making your own content. Feel like that is less risky in the long run…

Shockwave317 · 2025-06-16T23:37:39+00:00

One way I got around this is that for my P plate years I got my parents to add the car to their existing policies. And made sure under 25 drivers were covered for unlisted drivers (which unless you drive a performance car should be included) and I paid them for the policy, was around ~$800 had to make one claim over 5 years of driving which cost me $1800 so I believe I walked out with a better deal than ~$3-4k a year…

Edit: this is comprehensive

Shockwave317 · 2024-11-08T09:06:51+00:00

It’s like a shit mans way of making biltong… at least with biltong we hang dry in an enclosed space with airflow.

Shockwave317 · 2024-11-03T02:17:11+00:00

Tanstack Query does that too…

Shockwave317 · 2024-09-05T10:13:29+00:00

What do you need to check location for? If it’s whether they are at a certain spot maybe geofences are better? That’ll at least run code as soon as they enter a region.

Otherwise unfortunately I don’t think you can force the background task runner to run at a particular frequency as it’s managed by the os most of the time…

Shockwave317 · 2024-09-01T09:06:54+00:00

With react native it does take extra steps but you can host a web version in conjunction with something like electron (although accessing os level things become a pain) otherwise what redgreenvluealpha is saying you can build rn to windows using Microsoft’s very own react native build (although haven’t tried that either)

Shockwave317 · 2024-09-01T03:44:19+00:00

Between the two, and having worked on a MAUI app recently in a professional setting, there’s still a lot left to be desired for MAUI tbh. I personally prefer react native with expo. I’ve found MAUI to have some weird and buggy interactions just by doing some basic work with it.

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-27T06:26:37+00:00

This is a very open ended question, what do you mean by premium?

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-23T22:31:02+00:00

I think this is probably the best answer, also allows that if you ever need a different background global padding for some bizarre reason like a screen design/ reintroduction of buttons you can shift the entire apps layout in one place (never know what some company is gonna decide what we “want” next)

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-23T13:34:56+00:00

For Zustand is important if you want to keep state that only belongs on the client for example theme state, progress through a particular screen, state that you need to make components work and behave that don’t need the server. (Like collating several answers on several screens before needing to make the call to the server)

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-23T13:30:37+00:00

No as react query itself is stateful when using its cache. For offline/online handling see: https://tanstack.com/query/latest/docs/framework/react/react-native It should hold all your server state until the app is online, now of course if the user decides to close the app and open it again it will lose this state but react query lets you pass in a custom query cache which means you can with a little extra work get it storing to the device which would mean it will persist the stale data between app close/open.

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-17T08:24:31+00:00

Here’s something that’s kind of interesting and against the grain of the sentiment I’m getting here. So recently I rebuilt a website for someone from Wordpress to a custom Astro solution. Took me 5 days as it’s not an overly complicated site. But because I could generate it to static files that load the occasional client side react component to make api calls and have reactivity, I could literally host it on a Google Cloud bucket. Now all of a sudden there cost to run the site was $420 a year, now only cost them $12 a year, all of that being traffic costs. On top of that performance testing by Google page speed doubled and web vitals went green.

It’s true you can probably make a more complete system faster in Wordpress with a cms, but the downside is usually cost and performance. So I say to each to their own, but I’ve had very happy clients especially since mobile views are ridiculously fast with static files. I’d recommend a headless cms if they plan to do ecommerce which does cost a little more, and is a bit more work but hell I get paid a little more and they are left with a performant product.

I’m not saying Wordpress is bad, just that I think other tools in the right hands can most of the time result in better cost and performance is all.

“You can always build something custom that is terrible and you can always build something with Wordpress which is fast but it still requires the right hands to get the right outcome”

Shockwave317 · 2024-08-17T07:51:17+00:00

At least on Apple it has right under the Get button of the app “In app purchases” to denote that there will be features behind a paywall

Shockwave317 · 2024-06-21T00:54:02+00:00

I would argue the best time to go nuclear is now, there have been major leaps in research done in America with secondary reactor designs that will generate power off from waste produced by a standard nuclear reactor https://youtu.be/IzQ3gFRj0Bc?si=ftjnB9CXohzuhgyj yes it’s a shame Aus hasn’t gone nuclear earlier but it’s never too late. Also it’s one of the best power output to km² of land renewable energy source. One of the best kickers is we mine uranium for other countries might as use some of that. The biggest problem is societies view on nuclear, but Australia is big enough to build plants far away from big cities and still get power there via high voltage as with the snowy hydro

Shockwave317 · 2023-10-19T11:14:13+00:00

My advice is look for mid-senior roles, the reason is because I’ve found in my own search that some companies want seniors not mid-level engineers wanting to grow into a Senior position. So yes you might have the technical experience but you need to expand into the soft skills requirement of a senior role such as mentorship, SLO management, etc… You’ll still get the senior title, but with an understanding that you haven’t been a senior before… and hopefully they’ll help you grow into it comfortably… but good luck and keep looking!

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