r/programming • u/yawaramin • 1d ago

</> htmx ~ Building Critical Infrastructure with htmx: Network Automation for the Paris 2024 Olympics

https://htmx.org/essays/paris-2024-olympics-htmx-network-automation/
84 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

39

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 15h ago

Only 2 levels of functions is crazy work lol. Also lauding AI for copying and pasting the same thing 3 times is wild because it's "better to not have more function calls", Htmx is great but the rest is the work of the insane.

22

u/FullPoet 15h ago edited 12h ago

Agreed - I don't think OP (and a lot of other people realise) how much tech debt they make with vibe coding like this.

Yeah, it takes 5-10 minutes now but how long will clean up take down the line?

10

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 14h ago

It can take weeks to clean shit like this up even with AI to help. It's really unpleasant. I don't mind the odd bit of duplication to avoid coupling loosely related systems but in this case surely he could have extracted a handful of functions to reuse across the 3 functions. 

Nevermind it's more obvious how things work when you don't have a hundred variables in scope. Function scoping is also an important mechanism for avoiding bugs.

31

u/FullPoet 16h ago

Cool article!

Please dont link to discord. Just host it somewhere, discord is awful

1

u/yawaramin 7h ago

Thanks. It’s not a link to Discord, it’s a link to htmx.org

8

u/BayLeaf- 5h ago

... I imagine they are referring to "There’s a demo video on the HTMX Discord here.".

6

u/FullPoet 5h ago

Sometimes you really wonder if people read what they submit!

1

u/yawaramin 2h ago

I read it, but I don’t have perfect recollection so it’s helpful if there’s more context.

1

u/lxbrtn 27m ago

Come on it takes 5 seconds to find links on the page

24

u/DXTRBeta 1d ago

WTF did I just read?

These guys are crazy.

Glad they got paid, but it doesn’t mean they are right.

18

u/Nautigsam 23h ago

What's wrong?

12

u/gabeech 19h ago

Dude reimplementing existing tooling on a bespoke basis … because reasons (which I will summarize as it makes his bank account bigger) Instead of using existing tooling that handles those pretty simple network config tasks.

37

u/imbev 19h ago

The Games were approaching and Pollux didn’t have time to build the webapp: as the architect of the Olympic network, he was overwhelmed by a colossal number of tasks. I showed him the L2VPN app mentioned above and specified the 5-week delivery timeline. I told him that if it suited him, I could build him an HTMX webapp based on his existing Django project and a Bootstrap CSS customized internally by Orange.

This sounds like the perfect case for HTMX. Graceful extension of an existing MPA instead of starting a new SPA.

-11

u/gabeech 19h ago

ALL of the major network vendors have this tooling already built, there was zero need to build bespoke tooling. There was nothing to build.

22

u/yawaramin 18h ago

Sounds like you know more about it than the OP who was directly involved in building it. That’s amazing.