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Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

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Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#51

Post by willio58 »

quest88 wrote: post #12
willio58 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React isn’t complicated. It’s not even considered a framework, it’s better described as a library! It’s a great way to templatize your code. Is it the only way? No. Do you even need to templatize your code? No.

Stop it. You know what they mean.

I guess I don’t? Are you referring to the framework comment? Next.js is a great example of a react _framework_. It’s opinionated, it provides tools to make a fully-fledged website. If you just drop react into a site with a script tag, you get what react offers. You get a way to manipulate a virtual dom and render components.

Instead of saying “you understand what they mean”, please give an example of how I mis-stepped. I don’t want to come off as antagonistic for no reason.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#52

Post by PrimeMcFly »

arrowsmith wrote: post #14
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #2

Yes you don’t need React for a static site. Is this news at this point? Also I find the colour scheme hard to read but maybe it’s just me.

> Is this news at this point? If you started your career in the last 5-10 years then yes, it might be news. An entire generation of web developers has been trained to think that every app big and small needs to be a convoluted SPA. The results are a disaster.

You think they would have discovered Flask or something similar just out of personal curiosity.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#53

Post by zwily »

arrowsmith wrote: post #21
eropple wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A convoluted SPA" is fully orthogonal to React. If you're making a blog into a SPA, that's a you problem. It's been possible (and recommended for many things!) to just bake a static website with React and use JSX as a templating language for a long time.

Why would you need JSX for a static website? If you need JS then it's not "static".

Static doesn’t mean no JavaScript. Usually it means it’s not rendered on the server.

Every time i start making a static website, i end up needing to include a table (or some other structured display of data) and then just switch to JSX to render the data with a loop. Sometimes i then render it as html and deploy, and sometimes i deploy it as react. But that’s how i usually end up using React even when static.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#54

Post by beej71 »

syx wrote: post #37
carlossouza wrote: post #17

> I became a dev when everyone was hiring for React, so React is what I taught myself immediately after bootcamp in the scramble for a job A better education path (in a bootcamp, university, book, youtube, whatever) would start with the fundamentals and build it from the ground up... not the other way around. (I just realized how lucky I am for being taught in the best possible order, from the ground up... first the…

I think most of this comes down to the fact that these bootcamps are there to freshly bake people to work on the latest shiny tech completely ignoring the basics of computer science. I, like yourself, was very lucky to attend a university course that gave me exactly those fundamentals.

I worked at a boot camp that started off CS-"heavy" (relative to other boot camps). Unfortunately, they gradually just turned into a React shop to try to maximize profits. There were students who had been in the program for 4 months and couldn't write FizzBuzz. The placement rate was poor because students couldn't do technical interviews. I understand this particular company has made improvements since then (I've left), but it was fucking grim at the time. I now teach at a state university.

But yes, to anyone in a boot camp, get yourself some Khan Academy or whatever you need to get the fundamentals. This is an art, a science, and a craft, and you need to study to show your pride in that craft.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#55

Post by aobdev »

willsmith72 wrote: post #34

I don't get the value prop of all vanilla. The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have. Sure CRA was slow, but vite makes things sub-second again. It's like when remix people talk about progressive enhancement to me. Sure, cool, you can do things differently. But why? If you already know the ins and outs of a framework or tool and are productive with it, use it. I'm never…

It’s not a value prop, it’s just a statement of remembering to use the right tools. You even mention this yourself, just not explicitly, when you say “react app” and “vanilla site”. They serve different purposes and I’ve worked with many people who do not understand because react is all they know.

Remix is an improvement over react as a framework though because you can fall back on native browser functionality where the framework will fall short (high latency, slow devices, no JavaScript).

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#56

Post by mettamage »

syx wrote: post #37
carlossouza wrote: post #17

> I became a dev when everyone was hiring for React, so React is what I taught myself immediately after bootcamp in the scramble for a job A better education path (in a bootcamp, university, book, youtube, whatever) would start with the fundamentals and build it from the ground up... not the other way around. (I just realized how lucky I am for being taught in the best possible order, from the ground up... first the…

I think most of this comes down to the fact that these bootcamps are there to freshly bake people to work on the latest shiny tech completely ignoring the basics of computer science. I, like yourself, was very lucky to attend a university course that gave me exactly those fundamentals.

Not always. The bootcamp I worked for did 2 months of pure HTML/CSS/JS and then did a personal project for another month of which students almost exclusively used HTML/CSS/JS, some did React. Only in the final week did I teach React.

This was around 2017, most students didn't become React devs. Most students did end up in the JS ecosystem, but 30% did something else [1].

[1] When I say 30%, that's not an official statistics. It's just on my impression what I've personally seen from students who connected to me on LinkedIn. It's a guestimate at best.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#57

Post by cmrdporcupine »

camillomiller wrote: post #42
karpour wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by how how many web developers have the attitude of "React projects are too complex, let's put another layer of abstraction on top of React to simplify things". Of course, usually for things that should never have been React to begin with. Anyway, good for that guy that he discovered Vanilla HTML and CSS late in his career, but I also don't see how this is front page worthy.

My comment even got downvoted. There’s certainly some React diehards around I guess who really don’t want to hear that their overconvoluted approach could be simpler and leaner 95% of the time.

Your comment is likely downvoted because of tone, not the sentiment.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#58

Post by bdcravens »

syx wrote: post #37
carlossouza wrote: post #17

> I became a dev when everyone was hiring for React, so React is what I taught myself immediately after bootcamp in the scramble for a job A better education path (in a bootcamp, university, book, youtube, whatever) would start with the fundamentals and build it from the ground up... not the other way around. (I just realized how lucky I am for being taught in the best possible order, from the ground up... first the…

I think most of this comes down to the fact that these bootcamps are there to freshly bake people to work on the latest shiny tech completely ignoring the basics of computer science. I, like yourself, was very lucky to attend a university course that gave me exactly those fundamentals.

I think there's a place for what are essentially factory workers: taught specific skills for specific jobs. The problem is I think most don't understand the trade-offs and have unbalanced expectations.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#59

Post by smarkov »

willsmith72 wrote: post #34

I don't get the value prop of all vanilla. The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have. Sure CRA was slow, but vite makes things sub-second again. It's like when remix people talk about progressive enhancement to me. Sure, cool, you can do things differently. But why? If you already know the ins and outs of a framework or tool and are productive with it, use it. I'm never…

> The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have.

All the tooling we have is exactly why React has an overhead which is far from nil. Every package goes through a period of changing its best practices, some go through multiple. Entire packages go in and out of season, seemingly depending on the phase of the moon. There's a new bundler every year, each with its own quirks. For some things there's 4 "go to" packages that achieve the same thing but take a different path to get there. You have all these packages and tooling you have to learn, stay in touch with, maintain and fight against. All of that so you could ship megabytes of JS that ultimately just changes some text on a page. You can do all of that with vanilla JS and spare yourself the headache.

Re: Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything

#60

Post by willsmith72 »

aobdev wrote: post #55
willsmith72 wrote: post #34

I don't get the value prop of all vanilla. The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have. Sure CRA was slow, but vite makes things sub-second again. It's like when remix people talk about progressive enhancement to me. Sure, cool, you can do things differently. But why? If you already know the ins and outs of a framework or tool and are productive with it, use it. I'm never…

It’s not a value prop, it’s just a statement of remembering to use the right tools. You even mention this yourself, just not explicitly, when you say “react app” and “vanilla site”. They serve different purposes and I’ve worked with many people who do not understand because react is all they know. Remix is an improvement over react as a framework though because you can fall back on native browser functionality where…

> remembering to use the right tools

100% agree here. But if I were going to rewrite a whole application, I'd need a really good value prop.

> high latency, slow devices, no JavaScript

I don't see why high latency would be improved by remix, you're still fetching everything it's just without the waterfall. I've yet to see a modern-ish device (going back to iPhone 7s) that struggle so hard with rendering that progressive enhancement is valuable.

Are there modern devices which are that slow? Or browsers without js?

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