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I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

rachsmith.com

21–30 of 162 posts

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a big part of the hype cycle that is an actual industry with Patreon etc now. The first rule you should remember when reading HN is the real world is not HN.

> The first rule you should remember when reading HN is the real world is not HN. Can you explain what you mean by that?

How often do you see Rust mentioned here? Rust's actual use in the industry is minimal. Yes, it's growing, but it's relatively unknown. The small academic team I was on wrote a stats app package using Mithril. Nobody's using mithril, it's hardly discussed here, even though the author posts often.

I truly believe that mithril is better than React or Vue people just don't know about it, it's not part of the hype cycle. React is FB and was one of the first and Vue is designed in a very community-centric way. Had we done that project today, we'd probably pick one of those because they are a lot better on resumes.

HN is full of people that post dozens of comments a day. You have to ask yourself what the people who don't need to talk about it all the time are using.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#23

But why are you learning Go?

When I returned to work after my 6 month break, CodePen was moving their backend code from Ruby on Rails to Go, and Front End to Next.js. So I am now learning how to program with Go and reading a lot of Next.js docs and resources.

If you go to the front page of her site, it says

Hi I'm Rach. I'm a developer building software for CodePen, wife, mother of two, productivity nerd and recovering screen addict. This is my blog.

So: someone at $dayjob decided it was time to rewrite $dayjob in Go. Thus, everyone there must learn Go.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#24
I switched to Flutter 2.5 years ago for frontend. The blessing of having incredibly well designed UI framework that gives you NATIVE iOS/Android/WEB/MacOS/Linux/Windows app from the single code (in a decent language and without a gram of html/css/js crap) is hard to describe. I'm stunned by how many devs yet to discover flutter.

Web frontend ecosystem is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks compared to what Flutter team and community has built over just few years.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#25
post #10
post #2

I love her attitude, and I think mine's similar. Main difference being that I usually enjoy the learning experience; don't find it frustrating. I kinda love that beginner feeling and knowing there's lots to explore. Even if I end up disliking what I'm trying, I usually manage to find things I learned from it; so it's still good! Edit: To anyone wondering about the comments, I initially assumed the author was a guy! M…

Yo, she's a woman.

You don't know that.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#26
post #20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yo, she's a woman.

Hello! Thank you for pointing that out! I was a bit silly and somehow came to the (wrong) conclusion that "Lucas" (the first commenter) was the name of the author... I don't even know what to say lol. I just went a bit derp there.

Stop assuming that names are indicative of gender, dude.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#27
post #2

I love her attitude, and I think mine's similar. Main difference being that I usually enjoy the learning experience; don't find it frustrating. I kinda love that beginner feeling and knowing there's lots to explore. Even if I end up disliking what I'm trying, I usually manage to find things I learned from it; so it's still good! Edit: To anyone wondering about the comments, I initially assumed the author was a guy! M…

> this guy The author isn’t a guy! I agree otherwise, it’s refreshing perspective. I spent a few years fairly deep in backend work and worried quite a bit about going back to the front. Ultimately it ended up being a valuable break and pretty much all of the important things I’d learned before were still totally transferable. I think as long as you’re learning something, regardless of the discipline, your brain will…

> The author isn’t a guy!

Says who?

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first rule you should remember when reading HN is the real world is not HN. Can you explain what you mean by that?

How often do you see Rust mentioned here? Rust's actual use in the industry is minimal. Yes, it's growing, but it's relatively unknown. The small academic team I was on wrote a stats app package using Mithril. Nobody's using mithril, it's hardly discussed here, even though the author posts often. I truly believe that mithril is better than React or Vue people just don't know about it, it's not part of the hype cycle.…

Rust has a huge exposure in the programming community. I may not know how to write it, but I sure know what it is. It's not just limited to HN in awareness.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#29
I've found the way to reduce churn the most is discard frameworks and DSLs whenever possible.

This morning, I rewrote a page of frontend code for a scheduling webapp. I'd initially built it in TS/React years ago. Switched to Rust/WASM with a custom VDOM-based framework a year ago.

I'm reasonably confident I won't rewrite it again in a new framework: the new page is an HTML document with an included JS script that performs standard DOM manipulations using the API described on MDN. The code's now insulated from changing dependencies because it has none. And the page loads fast.

Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

#30
post #24

I switched to Flutter 2.5 years ago for frontend. The blessing of having incredibly well designed UI framework that gives you NATIVE iOS/Android/WEB/MacOS/Linux/Windows app from the single code (in a decent language and without a gram of html/css/js crap) is hard to describe. I'm stunned by how many devs yet to discover flutter. Web frontend ecosystem is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks compared to what Flutter t…

I don't think devs haven't found it, it's a combination of:

- They found it too early and it was pretty broken (I fit in this camp a little)

- They found it and consider Dart a step back from the main languages on most platforms. Dart feels closer to Java/ObjC than Kotlin/Swift for those who are in the mobile space and know what that transformation was like. (I mostly fit in this camp)

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