I love this. Yes, as mentioned by others, maintenance might be an issue, but that should not be the reason to abandon the whole effort of connecting elderly people to async TV and simple home automation. I am sure there are more than enough children or relatives that are happy to assist with these maintenance tasks. The author seems to have done similar projects for a lot of his peers and it seems to work for them.
And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
In the "Why Use this Website?" section on the frontpage of his site, it reads: "Get help developing products and services that older adults actually want and need."
I applaud the mission and the effort to document all of it in a guide-like fashion. Great job!
I get your point and this conversation might be as old as Laravel itself. I would like to point out a couple of things though:
The "hop in and be productive" part is directly related to Laravel being pretty opinionated. It's hard to have the one without the other. I think it's comparable to Steve Jobs, who had pretty strong opinions about certain things, too. The end result is a "product" that doesn't try to be the right fit for everyone.
Livewire, just like Jetstream[1] etc. is opt-in. When Jetstream was introduced, there was quite an uproar (by parts of the community) about Laravel forcing users into Livewire or Inertia[2]. The end result was (imho) a very healthy shift in communication around it (to emphasize the opt-in part), followed by the introduction of Breeze[3], which goes to show that Taylor does recognize the reservations some people may have about those new shiny toys.
It's a very natural thing that big projects like that will have an ever-growing feature set. That is an important part of keeping existing users excited. The Jetstream-discussion has been an important lesson for the team (I hope) and I'm glad it ended the way it did.
You can still build your Laravel app in a pretty similar fashion as you would have done 5 years ago and if you want, you can make use of the recent additions, so I think there's not too much to worry about to be honest. If you have outgrown the magic, isn't it pretty amazing that you can drop down one level of abstraction and just use symfony? Also, do you think you would've grasped many of the underlying features of symfony, if it wasn't for Laravel's opinionated wrapping in a nicer syntax (pardon my oversimplification)?
Nevertheless, I think it's good to keep up the warning signs and have this discussion from time to time. ;-)
As a Laravel user, I am extremely happy about the different paths you can take and I think it's absolutely fantastic that you are _able_ to avoid those magical things like a plague, if you don't want or need them.
I find Livewire a pleasure to work with. It's certainly not a hammer for every nail, but a refreshing step away from the JavaScript madness without sacrificing all of the good parts about it (anything async, basically).
My god, I haven't seen Craft before and... I haven't been so hyped about a software in a while. It's the perfect sweet-spot between Bear and Notion. Seriously... thank you!
At first I was a little concerned when I saw Notions "block concept" and it doesn't feel as snappy as Bear because of that, but the way you can start a new related document super easily from each block is just really good. The Search is amazing, changes are insta-synced between devices (like... live as you type) spending a little time on cards makes your doc look pretty good (if you care) and the share-options are all I ever wanted.
I also like the separation of "daily notes" and your regular documents. With Bear the sidebar always feels a little messy (despite pinning), but if daily docs are moved to a separate area that is ordered by time, it cleans up the "stage" for my more important, long-enduring notes.
I just spent about an hour testing the waters with Craft, but this is love at first sight so far!
OP has been putting out a series of useful tools lately [1] and been very transparent about his process on Twitter [2].
Seeing this thread derail into a discussion about PHP is pretty annoying. It seems to happen to anything PHP-related here. Do that all day long please, if someone comes here saying PHP is the best language... but he created something useful and open sourced it - that deserves more than toxic bike shedding about your favorite toys.
And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
In the "Why Use this Website?" section on the frontpage of his site, it reads: "Get help developing products and services that older adults actually want and need."
I applaud the mission and the effort to document all of it in a guide-like fashion. Great job!