The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

Been developing with an HTMX/Django stack[0], and it has been a wonderful experience so far!

https://htmx-django.com

This week I picked up a gig working on a website for a non-profit organization, the needed some basic changes to a few forms. The reason they had to hire me, a web app developer, the site was built by some agency with Next.js / Jam Stack technologies, Contenful, AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify etc.

This simple website, is one of the most complicated monstrosities I've ever worked with. Every page downloads multiple megabytes of JSON from the Contentful API just to render dead simple pages with text and images. Every time there's a change in contenful, a new build in AWS Amplify is triggered to generate the site to static content... only the React code is so complicated with so many round-trip, nested server requests (n+1+1+1 etc) that the builds fail constantly because the API server (on lambda of course) which serves the Contentful content basically gets DOSed. I had to write logic to retry all app API requests just to get the builds to consistently work so I could work on the website. The code that transforms these megabytes of JSON into webpages must have been written by a mad man.

Also screw AWS for not building proper tools to debug AWS Lambda. Not having to manage servers sounds awesome, so everyone has started using lambda, but the developer experience of having to wait 10 - 15 minutes just to add a console.log line is like pulling out your own finger nails and then scraping them on a chalkboard. Then AWS built the most noisy, difficult to use and hard to navigate log management solution on the planet (CloudWatch), and started sipping their beers.

You can avoid these technologies all you want, but one day you're going to have to work with a project that choose to use them, and you can't control that. I believe library authors and service providers have a responsibility to think about developer experience that's being ignored. Or perhaps, since developers don't always have a choice in the technologies they use, building easy to use developer tools isn't worth it.

Vue.js is a great project for front-end enthusiasts, but if you look at business objectives (aka getting things done) you would want to use React for any web app: The ecosystem in terms of libraries, help articles, developers is at least 10x bigger.

The release of Vue 3 definitely makes this situation worse for a couple of years in which using Vue 2 is still an option. Effectively fragmenting the Vue-camp further.

TLDR: Use React with vite and pin your dependencies to avoid everything mentioned in the article.

I work on a large, highly interactive web app that does a lot of the fancy stuff like code push to native apps, offline caching, heavy use of browser storage, real time collaboration. Our stack is React, Express, Typescript, built with Webpack. Every year or so we upgrade one of these major components, like Webpack, which does take a week, following a semver major migration guide, but usually nets us some performance and developer productivity wins. I’m sure if I tried to upgraded all our dependencies at once, it’d explode. So, we don’t do that.

Maybe I sound like a C developer arguing “C unsafety is fine, just don’t make mistakes”. There’s a ton of hype around JS libraries — of course there’s bigger hype waves in this ecosystem given its population and ease of publishing (compare to Java where you need to open a JIRA ticket to publish to maven central) but it’s a personal choice to follow fads like installing this ChakraUI thing or to use boring tools that you already know work.