How to develop products quickly with a small team? Server-side rendering is back!
There are thousands of ways to do this so we scoped our discussion to smaller startups and bootstrapped companies. The most important thing to do when you want to maintain agility and speed is to have a small team.
But with new technologies like single-page applications written for example in React, this is getting harder and harder to achieve. If you want to ship a truly perfect experience on all platforms you will need 4 people. IOS, Android, Frontend, and Backend developers.
Now, there are cases where this is needed, for example, if you want to create something complex. Like a website builder or you require a lot of fidelity in your UI. But for most (smaller or bootstrapped) companies 'good enough experience is usually... enough.
It's about solving the problem at hand and not duplicating your work 3 times to get a perfect product.
Well, the good news is that server-side rendering is getting better.
With modern libraries, you can have just a single codebase (let's say in Django or Rails) and add similar interactivity that you would get with frameworks like React on the server-side. Suddenly you do not need several different technologies to complete a product but just one with 1 or 2 talented developers.
This is nothing new, server-side rendering was used since the web was created by we are finally getting to a point we can add an incredible amount of fidelity to the UI with just templates / HTML and use frameworks like React for more complex products.
I discussed all of this with my technical co-founder to get more context about why we use SSR, why is it so strong for us, and if it changes how I should think about our next product.
Love that you guys also mentioned the comparison with no-code!
Happy to hear that. I had to ask that as we always have the discussion if the idea we have should be done in no-code or in code.
How does it solve a problem with mobile development?
It doesn't if you really need a mobile app. But do you really need it? At least in the early stage? Maybe well-optimized mobile website is enough :) But maybe not. It really depends on the project - as said in the video
This comment was deleted a year ago.
I think it depends on the project. In general for most CRUD apps I would say yes. It's true that you will need more server resources but with 90% of apps this is not a big concern. App servers are usually cheap enough and easy to scale if needed.
The real advantage is in developer productivity. You can use one language for everything and avoid serialization & deserialization of data over the wire. This allows you to write your models once, not duplicate validation logic and reuse 15 years of progress made with server side frameworks. As an example you can easily generate HTML forms just from your Rails or Django models and avoid writing basically any code.
Just to be clear the experience will be slightly worse. It will definitely not be as good client side progressive app. But I would argue that with modern technologies & server side libraries like LiveView and htmx you can get to around 80-90% of SPA experience with most common types of apps. And that may be worth it for vastly improved developer experience and speed.
Duplication of the data model on the front end (and serialization) is such a big time suck. I've keeping my eye on Phoenix LiveView.
Exactly!
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Kind of, but depends. Take for example Basecamp, they don't seem limited by it. Anyway we discussed this in the video too :)