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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

#171

Post by wpietri »

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 don't even mind the keeping-up part. What I don't understand is how anybody keeps the code base reasonably up to date. I want to build something that lasts.

I was talking to somebody at a place where they're throwing away a big custom code base in favor of gluing together a bunch of aaS stuff. Four years ago, the system was cutting edge. Then they had a big round of layoffs, and they only now can afford to do new work again. One of the big factors in the decision was just the cost of getting everything up to date. There was a bunch of failed flavor-of-the-week stuff that needed to be rewritten. There was a bunch of technical debt from using cutting edge stuff (e.g., library versions pinned to particular GitHub hashes, forks of libraries to get that one feature or work around that one bug). And there was just the proliferation of different technologies picked because they were the "best" for the local problem, but definitely not the best when you account for operations and maintenance cost.

I'm hoping that the roulette wheel eventually stops spinning and the JS world settles on something, anything where I can be confident that somebody can come back a couple of years later and be able to extend it without having to throw everything out.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#172

Post by wpietri »

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…

Hi! Person who hires other people here. I too am self-taught, so I'm sympathetic. But these two things in combination scare me:

> [nine months] professional experience

> just give me a week to look through your website's codebase, I'll figure out how you guys do things and I'll start being productive before you know it.

I get why you think you can be productive. But a person with 9 months experience has no experience with long-term maintainability. Your definition of productive and mine are likely very different. And that you don't know that there's a difference means I can't trust you to write production code. You're in the "hazard" stage of expertise:

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertis...

Novice programmers are great, and I've successfully hired them in the past. But that requires a context where they can work closely with experts who help them improve while keeping them away from doing things that feel productive but are long-term harmful. Left unsupervised, they can, with the best of intentions, be fountains of technical debt.

> the way I think about getting things done with computers isn't tied down to any one specific framework

This is a dangerous way to think. In software, everybody is bright. Everybody is a quick learner. If your operating theory is that you're just way smarter than those fools who have spent time learning something more deeply, you're going to keep yourself from advancing in your chosen work. To me, you come across like this:

https://xkcd.com/793/

> Apparently I should've learned it all `n` years ago, and it's too late now?

Find yourself a context where you can spend n years and dig in. Go make things. Go maintain things. Go find the edges of your knowledge and develop a little humility. Because without it, you're going to have a very hard time successfully asking people to give you a job where there going to have to give you a lot of help.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#173

Post by andybak »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #165
andybak wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the two simplicities one has an actual impact on usage.

I guess what I really meant to say is that you could levy the exact same concerns on many other libraries / frameworks. None of that is specific to React. I guess I was also assuming that if the OP was considering using React in the first place, that they were doing more with jQuery than just minor interactivity improvements. But I suppose your concerns are valid if that assumption isn't true. I'm thinking app, not b…

Maybe he was but I do worry that anyone new to front-end is being pushed towards frameworks rather than being told to start with the simplest approach possible.

I saw a comment from someone a few weeks ago who knew angular but had never used jQuery. I was rather baffled how that had come to pass!

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#174

Post by DiegoZoracKy »

This article is very good and sums up very well a feeling that a lot of us is having right now. However, i think that title is throwing an error, as the article is not about learning JavaScript, but, only about learning Front End. I wrote a little about it here:

https://medium.com/@DiegoZoracKy/stop-blaming-on-javascript-...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#175

Post by DiegoZoracKy »

This article is very good and sums up very well a feeling that a lot of us is having right now. However, i think that title is throwing an error, as the article is not about learning JavaScript, but, only about learning Front End. I wrote a little about it here:

https://medium.com/@DiegoZoracKy/stop-blaming-on-javascript-...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#176

Post by adamrezich »

wpietri wrote: post #172
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…

Hi! Person who hires other people here. I too am self-taught, so I'm sympathetic. But these two things in combination scare me: > [nine months] professional experience > just give me a week to look through your website's codebase, I'll figure out how you guys do things and I'll start being productive before you know it. I get why you think you can be productive. But a person with 9 months experience has no experience…

Nine months professional experience, over a decade of making websites, web apps, games, and game engines, in a wide variety of languages, frameworks, etc.... but all at an "amateur" level, which is not what hiring departments are looking for right now. I've been making websites since HTML4. In high school (graduated '09), I had a thumbdrive with Portable Notepad++, Firefox, and XAMPP, and I'd work on stuff in the library between classes and during lunch. I've been almost always working on at least one personal project at a time for the past decade, and while none of them are groundbreakingly impressive, my portfolio shows that I know what I'm doing... but that doesn't matter to hiring departments, apparently, because it's not "professional experience".

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#177

Post by akhilcacharya »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #151
Ajedi32 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He uses a mac. I use windows. Aaah, good luck. For me it's basically gotten to the point where if the build doesn't immediately work on Windows, I just fire up a Linux VM and work off of that. And that's not just for front-end projects, but for open-source projects in general. Windows support is often really lacking in an environment where devs seem to use Linux and Mac almost exclusively.

That was actually my first response too... I set up the build process on my linux test server while I continued to battle to get it working on my daily drive win10 machine.

At least now we have WSL to work with.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#178

Post by nikdaheratik »

throwmenow_0139 wrote: post #114
nikdaheratik wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The toolset itself has the weirdest gaps. You can get to 80-90% of a website design really quickly with the standard angular+bootstrap or whatever. But when a client wants it to do "Feature X" that is in one of the gaps then you're stuck spending hours trying to either hammer the problem into one of the frameworks or roll your own solution. And it's very hard to explain how "Feature X" took nearly half the time of st…

I don't think that it's fair to blame the frameworks. You should see it the other way 'round: They save you 80% of your time. The 80/20 rule is real ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle ), 20% of the whole work needs 80% of your time. If you have problems explaining why features need their time, it's not about your frameworks, it's about explaining the clients in all honesty what happens. Or, if you want…

It's not about "blaming" anything. But the fact is that software development is much harder to make an accurate estimate for, in many ways, than a highway project and this is because the tools we have available to use are not as mature as they could be.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#179

Post by wpietri »

adamrezich wrote: post #176
wpietri wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Person who hires other people here. I too am self-taught, so I'm sympathetic. But these two things in combination scare me: > [nine months] professional experience > just give me a week to look through your website's codebase, I'll figure out how you guys do things and I'll start being productive before you know it. I get why you think you can be productive. But a person with 9 months experience has no experience…

Nine months professional experience, over a decade of making websites, web apps, games, and game engines, in a wide variety of languages, frameworks, etc.... but all at an "amateur" level, which is not what hiring departments are looking for right now. I've been making websites since HTML4. In high school (graduated '09), I had a thumbdrive with Portable Notepad++, Firefox, and XAMPP, and I'd work on stuff in the lib…

You seem to skate past the substance of what I said, which is unfortunate.

Professional experience matters. Plenty of people are amateur cooks, but that doesn't mean they can step into a restaurant and do well. My brother does furniture-making and carpentry for a living, and it's the same thing there. I imagine it's true for most professions. That you can't see a difference does not mean there is no difference.

If you really think you can handle the work, then I'd suggest you apply at places without "hiring departments". Find small companies, where the person you first deal with is the hiring manager. The more people involved in deciding to make an exception, the less likely it is to happen. But you'll have a much larger chance of getting that exception made if you can see yourself through their eyes, which is as a person who's probably going to need a lot of help.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#180

Post by rbanffy »

arctangent wrote: post #70
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…

It doesn't have to be this way. Unfortunately, we live in a world where younger developers "show their skill" by making things overcomplicated in order to create unnecessary barriers to entry to our proto-profession. My usual response is to refuse to work on such a project if I don't have the authority to change how things are done to make them more sane.

> in order to create unnecessary barriers to entry to our proto-profession.

I wouldn't say it's malice. I think they simply don't know better.

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