It has the extra benefit of only showing 60 latest HN items in 2 pages of 30, which helps me not spend too much time on HN going down interesting rabbit holes.
It has the extra benefit of only showing 60 latest HN items in 2 pages of 30, which helps me not spend too much time on HN going down interesting rabbit holes.
If you insist on rolling your own, Django + templates should be plenty. Lots of existing code for integrating Stripe or whatever. AI will be fine at it. You could potentially investigate medusajs or prestashop. Here's a list that could be fun to investigate: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab... but keyword is fun. You should build it in wordpress because that is a bombproof solution running like half the internet and will save you endless amount of time.
If you're doing this as an exercise to learn a new tool, leave the AI to the side as you're robbing yourself an opportunity to delve into docs and gain more domain knowledge. And absolutely do not touch nextjs with a 10 foot pole, it's an absurdly overwrought tool. The only people that should learn nextjs are people working at dev houses that churn out a shitload of full stack apps for clients that have the budget to shell out for vercel's hosting costs. And even then imo they should just be using django + react + vite + tanstack MAYBE.
HTMX is cool but I'm not sure the point, again if for fun why not, but I would ask yourself: you get your site up and running and you spend the next year scrambling around putting things in boxes and printing shipping labels, and then in 2026 Thanksgiving right before the holiday rush something breaks in your app and you want to fix it but HTMX/nextjs/whatever have gone through 2 breaking change upgrades and so have 4 different libraries they rely on and actually the most up to date version of two libraries you rely on are not interoperable right now because they depend on different node versions or some other bullshit, and now what do you do?
Just use wordpress.
- I used the product variations feature, 18 variations per product, and all of a sudden the "Duplicate" button took 15 seconds! I learned this is because each variation is it's own thing, so it was making 18 new things (still insane it took that long, on my beefy dev pc). I can't imagine 30-50k products * 18 variations * metadata stuff working fast in any way.
- In avoiding product variations, there's plugins for adding product fields, and plugins for pricing rules, but clicking around to do stuff, or maybe writing php that integrates with plugins that I'm clicking around in... it's not the way I want to spend my time developing. It especially integrates terribly with AI tools, which at this point are an important development tool for me.
- I don't want to have a 1-to-1 mapping between products and pages. This doesn't fit the WC model well (or Shopify for that matter).
Generally, I can imagine an experienced wordpress/PHP dev being able to overcome these issues, but if I'm learning something anyway, I'd personally rather learn a proper frontend framework (be it any of the options you mentioned). Leveraging AI tools also matters.
I appreciate your response! Gives me more confidence in maybe sticking to Django + templates. But from what I've seen, and also in discussions with other developers, I think wordpress is out for this project. Thanks again :)
I'm about to start building an e-commerce site (30-50k poster print designs, i.e. no inventory), and was leaning towards a Django backend (because I know it) and... some sort of SSR frontend. I'm not really a frontend guy, but taking this as an opportunity to learn it. This article obviously does not inspire confidence in me choosing Next.js - would someone have any suggestions/pros and cons of what to use?
I currently see the options for doing SSR as:
- Next.js: well-represented in AI training data (though recent versions had breaking changes? I'm not sure), but annoying to actually use (according to this article/general sentiment I've found online), and pushes you into Vercel? (I barely know what that means)
- SvelteKit: best DX and nice to use, but might be less present in AI training data?
- Django templates + HTMX: possibly limiting? Less maintainable once you get to a certain size? I'm not sure.
- Other options?
It wasn't great.
- Installation using the provided binaries just fails on my machine - I have Ubuntu 22.04, which apparently has too old a version of glibc. Building from sourced worked though.
- Every time I want to open a new chat, it brings me back to the project list. I don't want to click on the same project every time!
- Scrolling is awful! It's slow, and it often doesn't automatically scroll down as the chat is generated so you have to do it yourself.
- There's no title or anything across sessions. If I'm now working on multiple things at the same time, I want to know what I'm working on quickly!
- The log/text entries take up so much space. Something like this would benefit from a much more compact view - it shouldn't use my entire screen to show me 1 TODO list and 1 tool use.
- Unlike the video, the code changes are all wrapped in a "AI Summary" entry which tells me what it did in a few words, with no option (that I could find) to open the code itself. Confused, couldn't find a setting for this.
- There's multiple UI bugs, and it's sluggish overall.
I didn't use the Agents stuff, which (given the video starts with it) might be the main focus? But as it stands, for my attempt at running multiple Claude Code sessions at once, this was too buggy to really work. Someone else mentioned https://conductor.build/, which might be more what I'm looking for, but unfortunately it lacks Linux support.
I hope it gets better! I could see myself using it after a few more releases, and I'm rooting for them - just sharing my experience here for others who are considering trying it.
When FitBit bought Pebble in 2016, some may argue that this was a good thing, the development of the watch and the OS just stopped - it was dead. FitBit had no intention of keeping the Pebble and just wanted to implement the software into it's own ecosystem.
Google bought FitBit in 2019 and released the source code for PebbleOS this year - but that is kind of late now, isn't it?
I don't think anyone was arguing this - Pebble simply went bankrupt. FitBit just bought some of their IP/assets I think. There was no expectation of them buying it and continuing support or development.
I honestly don't understand the vegetarian who constantly craves meat.
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But sometimes pure tech really scratches that itch, you know? Startup culture sounds super fun! Or I spend too much time on hn, idk. I'd love to make use of my relatively generalist skills, and just try to make something that people use. Ideally, even improve their lives.
I'm probably being way too optimistic on what I can realistically find, especially at this stage of my career, but hey you gotta start somewhere. If anyone's reading this - hi! Thank you for reading whatever this is, I think I roughly just want to give an idea of my uhhh... vibe.
Final (serious) note, because at the end of the day I am looking for a job: I try to write clean, performant code, using the right technologies for the job. I care about creating well-designed, intuitive programs. And I care about getting things done! If that's a piece of software, or using software to achieve something else, I'm happy to do it.