I worked at Apple in the 80's. We got a sabbatical back then - 5 weeks after 5 years. I saved a bunch of vacation and took off during the Thankgiving -> Christmas season for 3 months. I was afraid that when I returned I'd be totally swamped trying to catchup at work. Guess what - during the 3 months absolutely nothing changed.
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
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Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#32This is pretty much why I've avoided professionally doing front-end dev. The investment of time seems basically guaranteed to be worthless in less than 2yrs.
I wish I was better, since then I could truly build my own products - but I'm aiming to have enough income just to hire more talented front end engineers to build for me instead of using time to build the skill myself.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You say that but my exposure to Rust was through HN.
That same team I'd sit down and chat with the CS PhD majors that were doing machine learning. It genuinely surprised me when a brilliant student said he'd never heard of Rust.
TIOBE is a garbage metric, but Rust's numbers are paltry there. It's key to some really important projects, but it still isn't a widely-used language.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#34I'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 per…
Interesting, I'd never thought about niche front-end frameworks from the rust / elixir live-view camps in this way. Totally makes sense though!
I'm still mildly convinced there's a front-end engineering bootcamp / JS framework industrial complex operating behind the scenes.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They more often are than aren't. If that's not the case, that would be surprising to me.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#36This is a solid observation albeit one I think most people come to eventually. For the most part once you have already dealt with the spectrum of tools, the new ones just aren't different enough to be worth killing yourself to keep up with. Know what they do, and what they are good and bad at if you are in the position to be making relevant decisions, but actually learning them just isn't that big of a deal.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#37Obsession with the latest frameworks and the proclivity to refer to someone as an "X developer" for some X ∈ {popular frameworks} is a sign of ignorance/immaturity, both for developers and hiring managers. Those with a solid understanding of the underlying principles (both computer science theory and, in the case of front-end development, the core web standards) are the best positioned to make the most impactful cont…
This reminded me of Rich Hickey's "on becoming a better developer": https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#38I'm no computer scientist, but there must be an Amdahl's Law equivalent for limits on speedup through X?
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#39Early in my career I saw that front-end was a whac-a-mole in which libraries and frameworks to pick up. It was so stress-inducing for me that I decided to focus completely on the backend. Sure, in Melbourne this has been a financial detriment (fullstack out-earning backend development), but the stress levels have far outweighed it personaly.
Re: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> Hi I'm Rach. I'm a developer building software for CodePen, wife, mother of two [...]