This is why I truly love support-driven development.
While it’s possible to prioritize problems that don’t affect most people (squeaky wheels) it’s a hell of a lot more effective than most of the methods I know to have a very low barrier to contacting you for users, and fixing the things that come up.
GetCalFresh.org. Way easier way to apply for food stamps. Felt good to have left after 6 years going from helping 1 person get help to over a million. Still going strong.
Also lots of strangler pattern iterations! That was fun.
I'm really sorry you're dealing with this. I'm going to mostly share info about public benefits in case it's helpful, just because that's what I know (and I don't have as much knowledge about some of your other questions.)
What state are you in? I know you mentioned SSDI, but just to relieve some of the stress of getting by, you should try to apply for as many public benefits as you might be eligible for (SNAP/food assistance, Medicaid [medical care], affordable connectivity program [internet], Lifeline [phone.]) With little or no income, you should get some decent support from these programs.
For getting disability support (SSDI, or SSI), you might consider getting a lawyer. You're right it can take a long time to get this, but odds go up if you have a lawyer helping you. You can also contact your local legal aid which you may qualify for based on income.
In terms of jobs I'll do some thinking and see if I can post more. Are there any activities that you can definitely do without getting stuck due to your disability? There are definitely options for flexible computer work, and also things that are more phone-oriented.
To add on to this comment, many public benefits are based off of financial households (who shares bills), rather than physical households (who happens to live under the same roof). For example, SNAP eligibility calculation is based off of who purchases&prepares food together. If you purchase and prepare food separately from the family you live with, then your SNAP household size is 1 (just you) and is based off of only your own income. Even if you don't think you'll qualify, it's worth applying because a) the benefits you receive are based off of application date and b) your caseworker may know of unobvious ways to adjust your income so you are eligible.
I love my reMarkable — got the 1.0 once the price dropped due to 2.0.
e-Ink is a blessing after so much time on screens, and the rudiments make it quite hackable. So I get a device that pretty much CAN'T try to grab my attention, a calm device, and I can modify it to do more if I want.
(For example, since it can OCR and send notes, I've prototyped a little "message queue" on the other end to receive my notes, parse them ["TEXT Jake this is a text"], and do actions.)
I've even produced some custom e-ink maps which look great for no-phone navigation. (Feel free to let me know if that's interesting to you, happy to share an example and how.)
> But there are also a lot of problems for which I can’t see any concrete benefit to using React. Those are things like blogs, shopping-cart-websites, mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites. For these things, all of the fancy optimizations are optimizations to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.
I think this is at the root of it — most web devs today don't see that some plurality or small majority of web app use cases these days just don't require the tradeoffs of SPAs.
But there's a generation of devs who've come up exclusively on JS tooling (Node, Express, React/Redux or Angular) and the crowding effect has therefore made those the default choices, if only because the labor pool is big.
My honest belief is you can more quickly build most functionality needed for most businesses with a plain-old full stack framework like Rails or Django these days.
But the real value of those frameworks doesn't show in the initial speed to build (though it's there!) — it really shows up in how much common functionality (logins, file uploads, etc.) you get for free 6-12 months in, and how low your cost of change stays over time as a comparable SPA app becomes a pain in the butt to add new features to.
Speaking as a young(ish) dev, I think the issue with SPAs is that it's that its use has been conflated with separation of concerns and agnostic backend dev.
What I mean by that is that the way we learned is that the old/wrong way (php style templates) mix front end and backend development, and data with formatting. It's better to have data available through rest APIs and then consume it from something. Which is mostly true if you plan on being available in a reasonable way from smartphone apps, etc. but of course that means that your website should also be a client capable of working as similarly as possible to a mobile app - there you go, SPAs.
We need to find a way to keep those benefits without the bulk of current SPAs. But SPAs appeared for a reason, and it would be wrong to ignore why it happened. Being able to have front and backend devs working in parallel is a benefit, being able to server your content to several frontends is a benefit, etc.
(And if you're thinking "these people don't need apps anyway", the reality is that clients demand to have them - even if it's only so they can bother users with push notifications or collect data, they do ask for them).
I agree with this. In my experience, adding React or friends doubles the size and complexity of your application and in a lot of cases, the benefits accrued are not worth it. You essentially end up having two applications to maintain and therefore two places to manage state and make sure they sync correctly.
I commented below that I hope frameworks like Phoenix LiveView will be the future. Seems like the best of both worlds, the simplicity of server side html rendering with SPAlike interactivity. Of course not perfectly. There are tradeoffs no matter what decisions you make.
There's no thin line for this, CRUD-FORM can be really complex or really simple. A thoughtful design choice must be made here between server-side-rendered html with some JS and a SPA.
