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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

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Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#101

Post by majewsky »

adamrezich wrote: post #73

Cross-posting my comment from reddit: I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I personally have with the crazy, messy JavaScript ecosystem is: - I am a relatively experienced amateur programmer (with limited [nine months] professional experience) - I can learn any new programming language, library, methodology, or whatever pretty easily - I don't have any formal experience using anything of this newfangled st…

A thousand times this. When I started at my first professional gig, I had to learn their language (Perl) from scratch. So I sat down for two solid days and dug through perldoc until I knew my way around. Two months in, I'm explaining the subtleties of Perl's syntax and behavior to senior developers who've been coding in Perl for 5+ years.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#102

Post by ChoHag »

greg5green wrote: post #85
zzalpha wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? If your application become sufficiently complex that it can't be easily grokked by a decent dev, that's when you know it's time to switch. Until then it's just over engineering (which the JS community admittedly loves).

Very few teams have the opportunity to switch later on, and if they do, it's at the expense of the job of the person who chose to go without a framework.

If you've allowed your code to grow so far that refactoring is impossible, you have bigger problems to fix than a messy codebase.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#103

Post by LaxisB »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #72
voidfunc wrote: post #64

Just a couple days I got into a conversation with my coworker about UI stuff. I had to test something against our dev UI. Last time I did UI work was back when having index.html, img/, css/ and js/ directories with maybe a script or two was the norm. I had to fucking run make and I still have no fucking idea what was going on when I ran make which compiled a bunch of shit. There was all this NPM shit going on (isn't…

I'm a content guy who knows enough web dev to be dangerous. I made 3 manual edits to a css file to fix a couple of incorrect background colours in our web content the other day. I was a good boy and made a pull request for those same changes in the git repo. Our developer explained that he doesn't actually edit the css file. He would have to work out the change in the hue (as a percent of the base colour) and update…

a big problem with npm is, that a lot of package authors don't use the .npmignore [0] which leads to EVERYONE downloading your source/, test/ and docs/ folder even if only that one file in build/ is needed. That, combined with the micromodule mindset, leads to insanity

[0]: https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/developers#keeping-files-out-of-...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#104

Post by thecotne »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #72
voidfunc wrote: post #64

Just a couple days I got into a conversation with my coworker about UI stuff. I had to test something against our dev UI. Last time I did UI work was back when having index.html, img/, css/ and js/ directories with maybe a script or two was the norm. I had to fucking run make and I still have no fucking idea what was going on when I ran make which compiled a bunch of shit. There was all this NPM shit going on (isn't…

I'm a content guy who knows enough web dev to be dangerous. I made 3 manual edits to a css file to fix a couple of incorrect background colours in our web content the other day. I was a good boy and made a pull request for those same changes in the git repo. Our developer explained that he doesn't actually edit the css file. He would have to work out the change in the hue (as a percent of the base colour) and update…

actually it's bad when build artifacts are included in git repository

so when you clone repo or edit it directly in github you don't have option to edit wrong file (compiled css file for example)

but i agree that js community has everything very complicated for learning but it's not that bad for everyone that already knows how tings work here

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#105

Post by andybak »

vinceguidry wrote: post #30
dhruvkar wrote: post #21

I couldn't get through the entire thing. Even knowing that it's a fun/sarcastic piece of writing, the portrayed pain is all too real, as someone just starting to dive into the front-end. In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?

Yes, you can. No, there's no real reason not to. But honestly, I'd go with React if you can. The reason is, if the app starts taking off, and you end up with a team maintaining your app, you're much less likely to end up with an unmaintainable mess in two years than if you use just jQuery. All applications, especially websites want frameworks. The framework is essentially a way to organize the massive amount of compl…

> if the app starts taking off

1. 'if' it's an actual app and not a web page with a smattering of interactivity

2. 'if' by 'take off' you mean becomes a moderately complex SPA

3. 'if' there's no alternative that is simpler and more maintainable (another excuse to plug intercooler.js here)

There aren't enough people saying "Are you sure you need a front-end framework?".

I've worked on several projects that had for no real reason other than the dev wanted to learn it. There is a threshold where it makes sense to use React or similar - but that threshold is being set way, way too low.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#106

Post by BoorishBears »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
tibbon wrote: post #11

This is pretty much why I don't do front-end. I'm fully capable of it, but I just don't like keeping up with this flavor-of-the-week. It just doesn't feel like programming to me, or at least not the programming I enjoy. Strangely, I see so many new developers rushing toward the front-end, which seems much more complicated in many ways than just building solid web API services, analyzing data, etc.

I do front-end, but native fronted. WPF, XAML, iOS, Android, Qt. None of them suffer from the same craziness of the web world. I used to do web and don't miss it. Actually it was my experience in Web projects that changed my mind that web should have stayed HTML/CSS.

I laugh when people doing web work say native is the horror show, the last bit of "churn" I had to deal with was figuring out if JavaFx would be the new Swing, and that pretty much sorted itself out...

After a few years with a framework, for all it's worts, you know it inside and out, limitations and all, and you can work around them. For web stuff it feels like everyone excuses having a million and one solutions by shrugging it off and saying "figure out your problem then find what works for those problems". The issue being there are N frameworks for my problem and I only know N/2 of them well enough to even start evaluating if they solve it, and if there are limitations a new feature comes up against, I'm back to square one in searching for another little tool for this new requirement.

There's something freeing about only having a few solid tools at your disposal, vs a million smaller ones with divided mindshare, even if it can be limiting.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#107

Post by andybak »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #45
vinceguidry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can. No, there's no real reason not to. But honestly, I'd go with React if you can. The reason is, if the app starts taking off, and you end up with a team maintaining your app, you're much less likely to end up with an unmaintainable mess in two years than if you use just jQuery. All applications, especially websites want frameworks. The framework is essentially a way to organize the massive amount of compl…

I agree - I think React is simple enough that there's no reason not to besides the overhead of JSX preprocessing (which I suppose isn't required but I would definitely recommend). It really is more of a library than a framework, which is great for starting out because there are fewer concepts to understand. Then when you start adding more people and your application gets more complicated and you need to manage your d…

React isn't that simple. You still have all the package manager/transpiler/build baggage. You still sacrifice pages that aren't blank if javascript is disabled of fails and all the potential SEO/accessibility costs of that.

And you suddenly end up with great globs of javascript in a page that might not need it.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#108

Post by noxToken »

adamrezich wrote: post #88
nikdaheratik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your gripe isn't with the knowledge base, but with the people doing the hiring. The issues there are very real in that, if you're dealing with a non-trivial codebase, there's no way to tell whether someone with very little real world experience is a competent programmer or just "faking" until you've got them working on it for a few weeks, and even then they may not be worth the time you put into traini…

This has been my exact experience. I just had a week of phone calls and emails about a very promising, well-paying frontend job opportunity. All of them were with no-technical-knowledge buzzwordy HR types who were very friendly and assured me that my resume and portfolio were great, and that I would be a good fit for the job. The whole thing ended with a phone call that went something like: "Hi, so, your resume says…

Two things:

All of them were with no-technical-knowledge buzzwordy HR types who were very friendly and assured me that my resume and portfolio were great

I don't inherently agree that this is how it should be. I do understand that businesses want to minimize risks (don't hire bad employees for 6 months) while saving time (don't interview them in the first place). One of the easiest ways to achieve the latter is by having minimum requirements.

The rebuttal to that is always having a good interview process that measures the candidate on a personal level while also getting a feel for their technical prowess. This is another problem. Some people think all-day interviews are perfect for this. Others want to show up for an hour or two, white board something relevant, and call it a day. Some want take home project. Others demand that potential employers pay them if they're so keen on giving a take home project.

I don't think there is a silver bullet. I think there are objectively better ways than other when evaluating talent such as being flexible. For example, a new graduate will almost never have 2 years of professional experience. A new graduate may have an impressive GitHub profile filled with completed, demo-able projects alongside contributions to other people's projects. While not a direct substitute, this is a damn good indicator.

No one can seem to agree on the entire process though, so we're stuck with HR Henry and his checklist.

(Before anyone says 50k is too low, rent is due and I'm desperate.)

Depending on your location, $50k can be plenty, Where I live, $50k is great salary for a single person. Also, pay isn't the only thing that makes a job worthwhile. My starting salary was competitive, but definitely at the lower end. The work/life balance, however, came slightly before salary.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#109

Post by thomasahle »

gettersetter wrote: post #77
tibbon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I've hit a sweet spot now in having done Ruby for ~8 years, so I can get away with saying, "having someone else deal with the front end. I just want to talk about data". The new problems I'm working to learn to solve are with ML, NLP, etc. I'd like to step away from web services completely soon, and just live completely with data.

I am curious, how did you transition into ml, nlp. I am thinking of transitioning to ml, as work is getting kind of boring for me, but most job requires at least a master in the relevant field. I am self studying right now, maybe going back for a master, but I felt I lack alot of necessary probability and linear algebra theorems. I can code svm, neural network from nothing. I understand basic markov chain, bayes netw…

The 2016 ml scene doesn't seem so different from the 2016 front-end wild west I gather from this thread. Unfortunately. Machine Learning is in rapid flux, the solid theory of svm and the like are getting abandoned for a lot of techniques that seems to work some times. Certainly some people have a very good intuition for what works, and how to make it scale, but there is no one authority and you have to keep constantly up to date.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#110

Post by JustSomeNobody »

pbh101 wrote: post #26
gadrev wrote: post #6

This was actually a didactic piece. While criticizing the current state of affairs, it gives a nice overview of many of the emerging technologies and how they fit together, even if for some tasks it feels retarded to pull such an entangled mess of dependencies. You can then go insane diving into any particular one :)

Being primarily a Java dev, it felt to me like half of this was critiquing the churn rate of using different tools (warranted) and the other half was lamenting the fact that people built tools to solve the common problems they have when developing in large teams (largely unwarranted). Most of those tools have direct equivalents in the Java ecosystem (and there is tool-churn in Java too, just slower). Facebook, Google…

Yes, it is called "Enterprising the sh out of it". And yes, Java (and C#/.Net) has a huge problem with that and Javascript is well on its way.

Large companies love to get cool haircuts and wear torn jeans and talk about building fast and being agile and yet, they continues to build frankenprojects.

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