r/techiegeeks

I know over the years, I've scoffed at quite a few things. SPAs. TypeScript. Tailwind. Serverless. AI coding assistants.

Most of the huge trends in web development went through a phase where people swore they were overhyped.

Some deserved the criticism. Some evolved and became genuinely useful.

Lately I'm seeing similar debates around AI agents and agent tooling. Claude Code, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, Lyzr(Control Plane) and a bunch of newer projects all seem to be pushing toward a different way of building software. Maybe we're still early, maybe most of it won't matter, but it does remind me of how people talked about TypeScript or serverless a few years ago.

What's something being dismissed today that you think will become a normal part of every developer's workflow in the next 3-5 years?

I’ve become really tired of the bloat with Elementor. The speed of building with Claude Code is making Elementor feel way less efficient, especially for clients who don’t really need or want the drag and drop / full edit control on their site. I feel like if Elementor doesn’t adapt to AI (beyond their near useless built in AI) page builders are going to get phased out almost entirely by AI. This is just the next thing.

I get it that Elementor and page builders get a shit ton of hate here. I know. Main reason we have used it for years is speed and clients feeling comfortable and able to update fully on their own without code if needed. Now the speed is not really an edge anymore.

I’ve dabbled a bit with other CMS platforms like Sanity. Our agency is so WordPress focused though that it would be a really hard pivot to move to a new CMS entirely.

Looking for advice on any setups for WordPress FSE and Claude Code. Is it best to just build off Twenty Twenty Five, or use another theme like Kadence?
I’ll admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Gutenberg / the block editor, it’s always felt clunky. Is there a good middle ground to start with? It’s okay if it’s not fully friendly to non devs, but non dev users should still be able to add new blocks/sections and edit content without entirely guessing what it’ll look like on the front end.

We typically use Hello Elementor as our theme for Elementor builds, so we’re looking for something similarly reliable for whatever we end up building with going forward.

I feel like losing some of the freedom to edit quickly or build without code is much less of a loss compared to the time and efficiency gained from having Claude Code do the majority of the driving when it comes to creating blocks and patterns.
What is everyone using?

Anyone else coming from Elementor who can relate and has had a good experience making the change?

TIA!

A couple of websites on my server have started redirecting to strange very spammy sites.

My domains are:

https://gallery.bentsea.net

https://animeoklahoma.com

These are both static websites. Does anyone have any idea what could cause this on a static website with no interactivity?

I was hired into my current job to do React and Angular development and, by the way, we have this WordPress site so we need someone who can do that too. And I told them in the interview that I'd worked with WordPress for 7 years, but that was 5 years ago and I'll need time to get back up to speed. So I was hired, and the WordPress site in question has pretty much become all I do.

I'll be honest, I don't like WP that much. But, we all have to work so I set about trying to make it enjoyable and I hit upon the Timber library. The appeal to it was I've done work with Drupal, I actually have contrib credits in that project, and as of Drupal 8 it uses the Twig templating system. Timber is a binding library to allow Twig to be used seemlessly in WordPress.

First question - why do this? Answer, full Model/View/Control architecture. WordPress out of the box muddles control code with view code in it's endpoints. Another pain point, for me at least, is "The Loop". I hate it. Functions with state are notoriously hard to unit test. Having to be careful not to switch up critical post variables while parsing a block is just a headache. I will grant, these are statements of programming philosophy and I fully expect disagreement. But if I'm going to be maintaining a website for the next several years I need to be able to be comfortable with it.

I walked into a nightmare theme base. The design firm handed off a site with a broken search feature and several blocks misbehaving. The code... oh the code. I'll give one of the worse example - there's a service directory block that displays every letter of the alphabet to allow a fast hop to the section of the page with services starting with that letter. The block file for this was 1200 lines long. The coder had copy pasta'ed every letter of the alphabet. After refactor the control code was 40 lines long - the twig template is 60 lines. 100 in total.

It was during this refactor I ran into the newer block.json pattern and fell in love - that makes sense. ACF blocks also make sense.

Eventually I converted the site over to using twig templates, and with that in place I wrote a test system to test those templates and their attendant CSS and JavaScript. See, the twig templates just need data loaded into them - they don't care where it came from. In my test system I can load "lorem ipsum" to my heart's content and not worry about the test breaking if someone edited the test page.

I test my site using Playwright ( r/Playwright ). The PHP side stands up one block at a time - and it's guarded to only respond if WP_DEBUG is on so in production the code is inaccessible. Playwright then iterates through the result. It can also provide data to be displayed, or change variables resulting in different color schemas being applied. The 200 (at the time of this writing) tests scan for the correct colors being applied and reference screenshots are taken to see if the rendering is correct. Each test is ran through 10 different device profiles, so 2000 runs occur. Takes my Mac about an hour to run the whole suite, which I do before pushing a change such as the upgrade to WP 7.

It takes away a lot of headaches, but it creates some. Timber is reliant on composer, and WordPress doesn't natively support composer. I use an mu_plugin named "00_autoload.php" to load composer ahead of all other plugins and it works, but it does mean my themes and plugins are not portable to other sites.

That's sad to me. I looked over on trac and there is a discussion on composer's inclusion I've joined - https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/47256

I've also given some thought as to why this situation arose, and it's largely due to the inability of PHP to alias namespaces to allow plugins the ability to run different incompatible versions of the same library where necessary. Hence I've been active on the PHP-DEV list to try to come up with an RFC for such functionality.

For the moment I'm seated in on this. I'll keep an eye out on things I can help with, and if anyone has any questions fire away.

Building a trading SaaS application for the last few weeks.

Right now I have a cloud server, python server and html file. I think probably 2000/3000-5000 lines of code. Many features that my application offers.

Of course there are bigger sharks comparing my application to theirs.

I have no customers right now, not even charging for my website.

But my question is... What makes SaaS company valuable?

Is it the features a code offers, customers, traffic?

For example: A rival big company that is similar to mine is "Finviz" the stock screener. They are completely free to use but you can pay. Another is barchart I checked how much traffic they have and they have millions of visitors per day, free to use but they lock the site after you view 20 webpages.

I know some companies get bought out before they go public just because of the wow factor, my project isn't anything special but whats something I can do to make it more unique?

More features, charge users, make it different from others?

This is my first software project new to the field. Sorry if this question is a basic business question might sound dumb to some pros.

Hi,

first of all, thanks for this sub and all the information I got, which sometimes helped and or entertained me.

This time, I need some advice about my webprojects and the way how they are hosted. Everything started very small and as time goes on, I faced with the following setup:

• 1 vServer (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 200GB SSD, Debian 11)
• 8 Webprojects (php, nodejs, ruby | postgresql, mariadb, mongodb, sqlite) ; 3 of which are public available websites; 5 have a limited user pool
• nginx as reverse proxy
• daily backup (with transfer to different server) of databases and uploaded files

As EOL of Debian 11 approaches, for a upgrade to Debian 13 my hoster recommends me to buy a new Hosting Solution and install everything from scratch.

>‘If your server is on an OS that is no longer supported, we strongly recommend you take this opportunity to open a new server with the latest OS and proactively migrate yourself to the new server.

I’m concerned having multiple projects running on just one machine, so this is a good opportunity to think about the way everything is hosted. I was thinking about splitting up projects and having at least two vServers. one for public available sites and one for intern projects.

I think one disadvantage will be the multiple setup expense.

What experiences do you have? Is one server just fine?

Thanks for any information and or advice!
Luc

^(Note: I know containerization, e.g.: docker is a thing, but I willingly tried to avoid it; I told myself, I want to be in control of everything, but basically its about not adapting to new tech. So for everyone just writing, “do docker”, please explain why and outlining a possible solution.)

For me it's newer Outlook, Word, and Excel. They feel worse than the older versions, slower, with features buried or missing, and a lot more pushed toward cloud defaults instead of just working the way they used to. And Windows 11 is a total disaster. Curious what other apps or sites people feel got worse after an update or redesign.