After 10 years of Frontend Development, I think I quit. What the HELL happened? I did some Vue.JS dev for a couple of years, (thank god Vue exists) but recently decided to dive into React & its' ecosystem. Is this: https://material-ui.com/styles/basics/#hook-api considered progress? I think I know what happened. Many ex-backend devs entered the field and being unable or impatient enough to understand and do CSS properly, decided to inline and JavaScripIze everything. Then came the Educators, the Wes's, the eggheads, the Public Speakers, Facebook and the like, and managed to convince the world all this is a good thing. I spent half an hour looking into the Material UI documentation trying to figure out how to add proper styles. This is sad. Fuck all of it.
10 years of Front end Development. I quit
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Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#2Couldn't agree more! Just took over a project done in React. Rewrote it in plain html, css and JS. Went from megabytes down to kilobytes. At least 10x as performant. Ended up with about 360 LoC JS to implement everything that was previously done with a ton of imports.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#3You’re not wrong. I just quit the industry as well; the multiple levels of webpacked transpiled bullshit, react modules for spacer divs and “type safe CSS” really got me down. Between ass backwards code, renting mainframes from Amazon, and surveillance capitalism I realized that everything I loved about commercial web engineering has gone to shit.
I have no idea what my next move is but right now I don’t really care.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#4People look at "modern frameworks" and they're so easily impressed by what it can do. But, it's very short sighted. If you're project expects you to implement a feature that doesn't work in that framework, all the sudden you're going to have a huge productivity disadvantage.
It's better to learn actual web development: HTML/CSS, javascript, jQuery. Learn how to manipulate the DOM and not expect a library to do everything for you. In the long term, it's much more productive.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#5Couldn't agree more! Just took over a project done in React. Rewrote it in plain html, css and JS. Went from megabytes down to kilobytes. At least 10x as performant. Ended up with about 360 LoC JS to implement everything that was previously done with a ton of imports.
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Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#6People look at "modern frameworks" and they're so easily impressed by what it can do. But, it's very short sighted. If you're project expects you to implement a feature that doesn't work in that framework, all the sudden you're going to have a huge productivity disadvantage. It's better to learn actual web development: HTML/CSS, javascript, jQuery. Learn how to manipulate the DOM and not expect a library to do everyt…
> they're so easily impressed by what it can do
Are they, though? I haven't worked with React, but I have had the misfortune of working with Angular and I was immediately struck by how useless the whole thing was - it was pure overhead, and didn't seem to actually "do" anything at all. At least with jQuery there were some cute accordion and slideshow plugins - Angular just made things slower and bigger. I asked the front-end guy who was pushing Angular so hard why we didn't just scrap the thing entirely and, after a bit of incredulous back and forth, got sort of a condescending "you'll understand how helpful it is once you've spent some more time working with it". Nope, just give me HTML/CSS/Javascript. I'm a programmer. I can program the rest.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#7Backend dev here. It's exactly as you said. Now I can easily write complex fronted with React. But the real revolution is yet to come. WASM is behind the corner. I believe it's just a matter of time and we'll see the Rust-based, React-like frontend framework that will be viewed as the killer of JS.
Long live JS, V8, TS and JQuery! Peace.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#8You’re not wrong. I just quit the industry as well; the multiple levels of webpacked transpiled bullshit, react modules for spacer divs and “type safe CSS” really got me down. Between ass backwards code, renting mainframes from Amazon, and surveillance capitalism I realized that everything I loved about commercial web engineering has gone to shit. I have no idea what my next move is but right now I don’t really care.
Go work on embedded stuff. There are lots of jobs where you work primarily with electrical engineers. It is pretty much the opposite of front end work.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#9Trust your own aesthetic ideals: can you use your anger to help push you in a positive direction? I agree there is a lot wrong with the React ecosystem, and its complexity. I wish I could suggest something unequivocally better than doing front-end work to earn money, but other options just have different compromises. Good luck.
Re: 10 years of Front end Development. I quit
#10backend dev here. mainly python/flask.
question: if I really wanted to start frontend this year, where would I start? recommendations?