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

rachsmith.com

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

#141
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…

Maybe it is because flutter is acting very strange when used in a web app. Scrolling is kind of not working. Or has that improved?

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

#142

I hate javascript front-end stuff with a burning passion. I wanted to make a small widget, and somehow I needed 100+ libraries for this. The compilation/build/etc process makes no sense whatsoever, and I just type magic commands and hope it works. I am seriously considering just using something like blazor or phoneix live view so I can ignore front end entirely.

You didn't need 100+ libraries, or a compilation/build process. You just thought you did because that's what everyone else is doing. You could have used plain HTML, CSS and JS and probably have built it faster, and ended up with much leaner code.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I once got bounced from a job interview for not knowing about a quirk of the newest XCode (less than a week old) Sounds like they did you a favor. Who’d want to work for people like that?

> Who’d want to work for people like that Recruiters, HR and interviewers often are nothing like the culture of the people you will end up working with. Treat everything as a potential signal, but take care not to mistake noise for signal. Also recruitment is often about reducing false positives (avoiding bad hires), at the cost of a high number of false negatives (failing to employ suitable candidates). Try not to t…

This isn't universal, but the best places have peers do some or most of the interviewing.

So only interacting with HR/management would be a red flag for me.

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

#145
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Rust has a huge exposure in the programming community. And it's used exactly nowhere. Can you name one project that is rust based and isn't part of the rust toolchain?

Redox, quite a few utilities that replace classic Unix ones with something that has a better interface (ls, and I think something that replaced grep), probably more.

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

#146

Haha. I ignored the web dev scene for a year or two to work on something else. Angularjs vanished and nobody will hire you unless you have worked with react. Rest is gone and everyone is obsessed with graphql. Kubernetes really took off. React alone isn’t enough though, it’s nextjs and everyone is looking into trendy redux replacements now. Typescript is everywhere. Everyone assumes you can’t code your way out of a p…

> Everyone assumes you can’t code your way out of a paper bag if you haven’t worked with their exact stack for one year longer than it has existed, even though it’s all incredibly easy to learn.

Indeed, I see this a lot – complaining about lack of skilled workforce and not having trained anybody themselves so far or even talking to someone with different buzzwords in the stack. That's parasitism at it's best, isn't it?

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

#147
post #113

Haha. I ignored the web dev scene for a year or two to work on something else. Angularjs vanished and nobody will hire you unless you have worked with react. Rest is gone and everyone is obsessed with graphql. Kubernetes really took off. React alone isn’t enough though, it’s nextjs and everyone is looking into trendy redux replacements now. Typescript is everywhere. Everyone assumes you can’t code your way out of a p…

I've heard of a theory that says "A's hire A's but B's hire C's". The gist is that cream-of-the-crop interviewers actively look for open-ended-ness and the possibility that the interviewee may be better at things than they are, whereas less effective interviewers only look for people whose skills are a subset of their own (and by implication, design tests that only leverage the skillset they know, hence the "must hav…

I agree that good engineers can learn most tech fast, and that that is due to experience and not them being inherently smarter than others. If this is true though, how do you measure (non specific) experience? Maybe asking for 100 relatively easy but totally random knowledge crumbs? (some web, some unix, some networking, some functional programming, etc). It would be impossible to score high, but well rounded engineers could get more of them right. This might actually be a better approach than asking a few hard questions.

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

#148
post #85

Earlier 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.…

> the author posts often. Oh hey, that's me :) I'm a big believer in the idea of mastering fundamentals, and even explicitly mention in the mithril.js framework comparison page[0] that you can build production quality stuff with any framework (including of course mithril.js) There's this pervasive notion with newer tech that new things must be objectively superior than old stuff, but the way I see is that everything…

Nice write up. Mastery of first principles is the only way out.

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

#150
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React didn't substantially improve code flow, and added a dependency, config, a build step, and DSL. Typescript added a build step and config. Stated another way: The new page is a single file written in web standards. The React/TS way is more complicated, requires a bigger download, and is slower.

Wasm and rust sound amazing. Are there any downsides? Performance issues? I heard there can be issues with dom manipulation but might be misremembering

Currently, WASM calls ultimately execute DOM API commands, so there is no performance benefit for DOM manipulation. This is expected to change, but I don't know the details.

I can't explain why, but WASM files end up much larger than an equivalent JS file. (And often larger than a NPM/framework-based etc JS bundle) Also, a build step.

Perhaps someone else who's used WASM more recently, or used it with a language other than Rust can comment.

It's nice being able to use whichever language you wish, but IMO not worth the downsides in its current state.

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