Michael Bromley

I think back to the hours of my life spent painfully trying to figure out how to make JavaScript work. Copy-pasting from random forum posts. This was even before Stack Overflow (RIP). Yes I'm that old. And I compare it to the velocity I now have using AI tooling.

It fills me with both dismay and excitement 😂 Dismay at the "lost" hours, days, weeks. Excitement at the realization that during that process I learned deep fundamentals that newcomers may now have little incentive or opportunity to master.

Sometimes I hear that it was a mistake to build @vendure.io on top of GraphQL. "Too complex", "Can't be cached", "Poor performance", "It was all hype" Yes, every technology has its tradeoffs. I'm keenly aware. There *are* some aspects you need to be mindful of when working with GraphQL.

And with our new Dashboard, we're leveraging GraphQL to help you build custom UI with speed and productivity you won't find anywhere else. First post contains a clip of what it looks like to build a fully type-safe list view.

Sometimes I hear that it was a mistake to build @vendure.io on top of GraphQL. "Too complex", "Can't be cached", "Poor performance", "It was all hype" Yes, every technology has its tradeoffs. I'm keenly aware. There *are* some aspects you need to be mindful of when working with GraphQL.

> @vite.dev is my new favourite thing. If you're a @vendure.io developer it's gonna become your new favourite thing too, very soon! I was vaguely aware that it was slowly taking over the frontend world - every framework seemed to use it for some reason.

➔ Automatic type safety from GraphQL _without_ a codegen step ➔ Auto-generated list & detail view based on your GraphQL queries ➔ Dynamic components that adapt to the exact data types in your custom schema

> @vite.dev is my new favourite thing. If you're a @vendure.io developer it's gonna become your new favourite thing too, very soon! I was vaguely aware that it was slowly taking over the frontend world - every framework seemed to use it for some reason.

Look, I've been around a while & remember when we used to bundle with Grunt, then Gulp, then Webpack. So isn't Vite just an incremental take on what has gone before? No - Vite has something that makes it magical. An absolutely sublime plugin API that feel like you can build *anything* with it.

There's one lesson that has taken me years to *really* learn in software development: Simplicity should be prized above all other things. Simple code. Simple logic. Simple dependencies. Simple deployments.

It's all fun and games until, 6 months later, you need to debug something and proceed to spend 5 hours figuring out what the hell is even supposed to be happening here. This message is brought to you by 7 years of hard-won lessons building @vendure.io

There's one lesson that has taken me years to *really* learn in software development: Simplicity should be prized above all other things. Simple code. Simple logic. Simple dependencies. Simple deployments.

But whenever you get the urge to bound over to your colleague to explain your incredibly clever solution, and get a pat on the head and a "good dev!"... "look, by using partial application and meta-programming we can dynamically construct a pipeline of operations that..."

There's one lesson that has taken me years to *really* learn in software development: Simplicity should be prized above all other things. Simple code. Simple logic. Simple dependencies. Simple deployments.