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

clairefro.dev

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

#71

Post by gedy »

yoavm wrote: post #28
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…

Agreed, but it's so rare nowadays though. I still remember when I saw a junior frontend dev struggling to get some element to look differently when hovered in React. They went though loops and hoops to style it using CSS-in-JS and mousemove, only because they didn't hear about :hover.

My favorite experience with Bootcamp folks was someone who came in do an interview, and she could talk, was professional, had nice looking blogs, etc. and seemed really awesome on paper. However, I had her do a really simple React exercise, and she was producing some really strange code like using Ruby inside of a JavaScript onClick handler? lol

I think a failing of a lot of these bootcamps is they encourage people to present themselves as more experienced than they actually are. I don’t mind someone who’s starting out, and has a lot of potential, but please be honest about your skill level, as it just disappoints the interviewer and misrepresents you.

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

#72

Post by bdcravens »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #52
arrowsmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think a culture has been created where anything resembling server-side rendering (other than Node spitting out JSON) is legacy to be avoided ..... until of course the Javascript creates its own convoluted version of server-side rendering, which is revolutionary and the new hotness.

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

#73

Post by bdcravens »

eropple wrote: post #15
arrowsmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"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.

It's also been possible for 30 years to do the same with languages like PHP, ColdFusion, etc, no build steps necessary, and HTML is your "templating language".

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

#74

Post by bdcravens »

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".

You use JSX the same way you'd use PHP - it just compiles into HTML. In this case, you just save the output after compiling it once. (as you can with the dozens or hundreds of non-JS options that do the same)

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

#75

Post by eropple »

bdcravens wrote: post #73
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.

It's also been possible for 30 years to do the same with languages like PHP, ColdFusion, etc, no build steps necessary, and HTML is your "templating language".

You totally can, but for my money that's kinda not great. Because HTML isn't your "templating language", PHP et al are, and you aren't templating around the DOM with typed objects, you're templating around text with all the pitfalls that entails. Object structures save time, reduce errors, and give you more to-the-programmer natural tools for composition and reuse (just call a function that returns a JSX object! give it typed parameters! declare victory and go have beers!).

I wouldn't go back to doing text manipulation to generate HTML, because I value not having to make sure I've escaped all my quotes.

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

#76

Post by teg4n_ »

yoavm wrote: post #28
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…

Agreed, but it's so rare nowadays though. I still remember when I saw a junior frontend dev struggling to get some element to look differently when hovered in React. They went though loops and hoops to style it using CSS-in-JS and mousemove, only because they didn't hear about :hover.

Seems like just lack of experience. You can even do it simply with JS with onHoverIn / onHoverOut

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

#77

Post by uxcolumbo »

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.

It's not just you.

The site has poor contrast ratio - fails all accessibility guidelines for text contrast ratio requirements.

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

#78

Post by bdcravens »

awestroke wrote: post #8

React is a great tool for building complex, large applications. Your blog is not large or complex.

Even many sites that are large and complex would benefit from being a server-rendered app. I've come across way too many sites that break in bizarre ways, and all they are doing is displaying text or HTML forms. Every time I check, they are React or Angular sites.

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

#80

Post by sfn42 »

revskill wrote: post #65
yoavm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but it's so rare nowadays though. I still remember when I saw a junior frontend dev struggling to get some element to look differently when hovered in React. They went though loops and hoops to style it using CSS-in-JS and mousemove, only because they didn't hear about :hover.

Then what ? That junior dev could produce working software, and fix the css issue later (if needed). Give that "senior CSS developer" a day and figure out how to manage state, then what you get is a crap.

Yeah that's gonna work out great when the entire app is built using weird overcomplicated solutions to simple problems, let's just clean it all up later! Doesn't matter how you write your code as long as it seems to work, well deal with all the bugs we discover later!

The proper way to do it is to do code reviews and teach newbies how to do things like this. Ideally they should have asked about it(or just googled) before the review.

I think "well just fix it later if needed" is asking for trouble and you're basically just writing legacy code.

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