A lot of it feels like someone who doesn’t like the old code and wants to do it “right.” I can agree that the old code is ugly. But it will take an awful lot of effort to make a new implementation. It’s a lot like what happened to Elvis: A rewrite was going to make it much better, but it took so long, during which Vim added more features, that eventually there are not so many Elvis users. And the rewritten Elvis may have nice code, but users don’t notice that.

YAML parsing is normally considered hard (complicated as the syntax is complex). With all due respect, personally I can adhere to that in part, the YAML specification appears to be at (isolated) places hard to read despite me self-imagined being trained over decades into reading publicly available specifications (in not my first language). To be fair, it is one of the very few specs that has graphics and by the nature of its formulation, compilers are hard to read as well.

Perhaps not a good idea, in general, to use a random PPA for such sprawling software as a browser. Auditability near zero even if it is open source.

Today, Sass uses complex heuristics to figure out whether a / should be treated as division or a separator. Even then, as a separator it just produces an unquoted string that’s difficult to inspect from within Sass.

But more so, external style cannot be applied to a subsection of a web page unless they force it into an iframe, which has all sorts of issues of it's own which is why external CSS is usually ignored. Inline CSS is often stripped by the tag strippers who don't want you turning things on or off... and media queries shouldn't even play into it since the layout should be controlled by the page it's being shown inside (for webmail) or the client itself, NOT your mail.

Email is Hard: learn how MJML will help you.

Also cross-compatibility with mail clients can be hairy, so you should see what the industry experts are doing.

But sometimes not even that helps; the onceability factor can, ultimately, trump the usefulness.

If you think that for every problem there is a simple and easy solution, either you don't understand what is a problem or you don't understand what is a solution.

For the $$$ question, nothing comes to mind. These problems i'm hitting up against are larger than a contractor could solve in a few hours of work (which would be hundreds/thousands of dollars).

Progress is slow though. I want to change how assets are loaded, the current implementation of "pipelines" is challenging to work with.

I'm not sure about all consequences of my change and this is very complex.

Validating forms has notoriously been a painful development experience. Implementing client side validation in a user friendly, developer friendly, and accessible way is hard. Before HTML5 there was no means of implementing validation natively; therefore, developers have resorted to a variety of JavaScript based solutions.

Redesigning the pieces was very difficult work, because traditional pieces have 4 specialties below.

we also wrap them in Failure to solve the second problem: spotting potential exceptions is hard

It turns out that, given a set of constraints defining a particular problem, deriving an efficient algorithm to solve it is a very difficult problem in itself. This crucial step cannot yet be automated and still requires the insight of a human programmer.

It is difficult to come up with content that is not extracted from a real application. Manufacturing scenarios to see if ideas have practical application turned out to be an exhasting and time consuming process.

I don't see a way to hook into Devise's route mapping load process to add the action (several monkey patching attempts failed)

violates our expectation that hard things should be technical

the 2 hardest problems in computer science are essentially the 2 hardest problems of life in general, as far as humans and information are concerned.

I think you’re missing the spirit behind the classic “centering is hard” complaint in a couple of places, which, at least for me, always comes back to not knowing the height of the elements.

They say that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Caching is what Service Workers do. It’s literally the #1 hard thing! … or maybe the #0 thing? Whatever. It’s hard.

If you want to implement a form with a superb User Experience, you have to take care of many variables:

This does solve the problem, but now our project and API is structured differently. In large projects it might be very hard to determine how to pull this trick off, or even impossible!

It adds a few constructs to the language to solve one of the most complex problems in UI development — state management.