No, I Don't Want To Configure Your App!

For the love of whatever you believe in, stop making applications that require the user to spend hours configuring stuff before they can do anything useful with it!
https://robotlolita.me/articles/2016/no-i-dont-want-to-configure-your-app/


Awesome article I found about the ongoing trend of apps/frameworks/libraries (particularly from Node-land) becoming more and more confusing and time consuming to use.

Highlights:

Rule #1: If I need to configure your application, you’re doing it wrong.

Rule #2: If you really need to, hold your user’s hands through using your app.

Rule #3: If anything goes wrong, you must help your users fix those problems in the best way possible.


I think this harkens back to about a year ago, when Meteor was so tightly coupled everything just worked straight out of the box with minimal ceremony.

And MDG is making strides in that direction these days again with React. Where using React anywhere else is just such a torrent of incoherent bullshit and god dammit please just work, oh my god, just run please!

MDG, you guys rock, continue building a cohesive set of tools for building ambitious web applications. There’s a reason you guys surpassed Big Daddy Rails on Github, and it’s because you’re onto something.

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One thing I disliked about the leading admin package on Atmosphere (yogiben:admin) is that it requires a ton of configuration. I immediately gravitated to Houston which was simply plug and play. Unfortunately, Houston doesn’t seem to work with FlowRouter so I was forced to write my own admin.

It’s very interesting - everyone has different weights for these different concerns. For some, Webpack is a nightmare of convoluted configuration, and for others it’s a groundbreaking tool that enables rapid development. It’s great that we have some of both here on the forums!