If you share the feeling, join the small Internet movement: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/small-internet.html/
I can only think that modern front end development has failed
321–330 of 521 posts
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#322I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…
Whats the business case for less JS? Recently the company I worked for started a project where it seemed pretty clear to me would be possible to develop with very little JS running on the frontend. But I couldn't convince anyone of it because no one saw enough benefit from doing it that way.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the core mismatch here is that you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue. Those two things often do not overlap. I can virtually guarantee you that NYT has spent thousands upon thousands of hours optimizing and multi-variant testing their headline display to maximize conversion. In other words, if they followed your advice, they would be leaving money on the table. As…
You are making my point for me: “you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue.” That is simply an attempt to explain away the bad experience of reading the Times . The explanation is probably correct. But by offering explanations for why the site is bad, you are implicitly agreeing that it is bad.
I wouldn't call it "bad". I'd say it's not perfect, and rightly so, because perfection would be lower ROI than some other things their developers could be doing.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…
> it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. A lot of people said the same in 1990, except their cutoff was 1980. All that synth is just rubbish, man, what about Led Zeppelin, that was new! Except they were just raiding blues and laying some electric guitar on top, of course, so really the cutoff is 1960; but to be honest them bluesmen were just r…
I think this essentially agrees with my point (that there was more creativity in the broad space of 'pop music' when pop music was a newer phenomenon).
I appreciate the reminder that a lot of pop music has a longer history as it developed from Black music styles. Thanks.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
That first part is the Web, while the second part are native programs with Internet connection.
I think you could have web rich documents with basic interactivity and as an option web application that are "native app like" , with tons of APIs for camera/microphone , bluetooth, canvas, 3d , complex sound APIs. We have to admit that rich web application can be very usefull, even during Java or Flash days we known that sometimes you need an animation or a simulation on a page to better present some content. Though…
Sure, canvas is appropriate for basic animations/simulations.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#326I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…
There is something very apt in your first line: A lot of sites suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen. If every department proves its worth by claiming space on the front page, customer experience will be the last concern. That's before someone notices how giving content away is not a monetization strategy. Then add the siren song of 'only one more script' for marketing data,even if nobody has a clue about what to…
It's like Million Dollar Homepage in a sense. Every stakeholder in the business wants their stuff in there somehow. Except we're gravitating toward the million Kilabyte Homepage.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon's user experience is fantastic. Why else do you think they are so commercially successful?
Amazon pages are a cluttered mess, but they are a -familiar- cluttered mess because everyone has used Amazon for so long. Amazon succeeds in spite of its design, because everyone has become familiar with how it works. This approach would not work outside of Amazon, which Nielsen Norman discussed some 15 years ago ( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m... )
I wonder how this might read if written now, rather than 16 years ago.
NNG often say to follow conventions and Amazon has been leader for so long now that I can't help but think they have established many conventions now that might have been viewed negatively 16 years ago.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really…
Got to agree with everything but > Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze Is still hit or miss every once and while depending on the use case. For example debugging service workers is still a bit of a nightmare. And I've also had some issues debugging a chrome extension written with Vue CLI + the browser extension plugin.
This is sadly true, but service workers are themselves hard to get right, and they tend to create subtle cache issues that are hard to notice until the deployment after their deployment to production.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Standard React could still be a bloated mess. React is ~6KB (even less g-zipped). React is very performant and its performance was one of it's original claims to fame over previous frontend frameworks like Angular.
React never claimed performance, and the virtual DOM is quite wasteful. Any direct manipulation library will perform better. Plus, it’s dishonest to look at react core size. react-dom, which is absolutely required, is 40KB minified AND compressed. Plus the usual plugins to handle icons, SVG, animations, and on on. A base React application easily crosses the 200KB gzipped mark.
> React never claimed performance, and the virtual DOM is quite wasteful. Any direct manipulation library will perform better.
React's performance (in large part because of it's virtual DOM) over Angular was a common benefit cited in it's rise to fame. Indeed no one ever claimed React was somehow faster than the document API (or even JQuery) and that isn't what I'm saying either. Whether or not you think the virtual DOM is wasteful in 2021 is a separate opinion and even Svelte devs admit the virtual DOM approach is usually fast enough.
> A base React application easily crosses the 200KB gzipped mark.
I didn't bootstrap a CRA app to check its full size, but considering a hero image alone can easily be larger than this, it still stands that React is certainly not "bloated".
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a government contractor reasonably justify a price tag that's on par with fancy bloated non-government sites, for an no nonsense form + js approach?
Costs the same as what you would otherwise pay, plus it actually works?
>plus it actually works?
Heh. "That was the most unkindest cut of all."
https://www.google.com/search?q=unkindest+cut+of+all+quote
Also, "the emperor's new clothes".
Both relevant.