yeah i get that.

generally most modern UIs are moving away from those reactive patterns (React, Svelte, etc) just cuz the composition can be optimized (Kotlin compiler plugin, shadow-DOM, etc), and a lot of people—myself included—find that declarative design easier to reason about. and yeah i guess i outed myself as an Android dev, but i can’t in good conscience recommend the node based Android XML UI lol (although that’s a different SDK).

anyway, not to yuck your yum. i played around with JavaFX back in the day but never made anything to speak of. i’ll have to check out more of your blog!

JavaFX with Kotlin

mad lad.

what makes you snub Compose UI?

honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc

i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS

ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:

• with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
• this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
• even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
• (this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.