Re:Plain Vanilla Web
by motogpjimbo on Monday May 12, 2025 @07:03AM
(#43961678)
Excel files can work surprisingly well in B2B scenarios where there's a high degree of trust. At a retailer I used to work at, we ran an impromptu Christmas gifts team in December each year, where corporate clients could put in a large order of gifts to be sent to their employees. Rather than build a website for it, we just sent them over an Excel file they could fill in with the name and address of each employee, the gift they wanted to receive and a message for the label. They'd send the file back to us and we had a process to validate the data and load it into our system. It sounds primitive, but it was much more time- and cost-efficient than faffing around with a custom application that we would only use for one month per year and which the clients probably wouldn't enjoy using anyway.
For real. The UX matters. Reducing the surface area for errors is also valuable. If “overbuilt” means “putting a clear UX around an important business process” then I love overbuilt.
It was like that one dude on HN that criticized Dropbox back in day saying he could have built it in a weekend using rsync and a bunch other nerd nonsense that the average person doesn’t have the time or the expertise to mess with.
> Email and flat files are far more flexible than any web solution.
Some times I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read HN lately. Suggesting that we e-mail requests around and have a person on the other end manually do things including merge data into SQL tables is such a bizarre claim to see. Every once in a while I encounter some business that operates like this and it’s inevitably a nightmare, either as a customer or a partner. Not to mention it’s ripe for everything from fraud to the company falling apart because the person who normally reads those e-mails and does the things for 20 years suddenly leaves one day.
This feels like a mix of rose-tinted glasses reminiscing about the old-timey way of doing things combined with a layer of career burnout that makes everything modern feel bad. Dealing with a business that operates this way is not good.