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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

#81
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progress…

> you're still fetching everything it's just without the waterfall

It's exactly because of the waterfall. If I have to make 3 roundtrip fetches, and the latency of each is increased by 150ms, then eliminating 2 subsequent fetches will save me 300ms.

> 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.

I have used an uncountable number of websites that are extremely janky, slow to load, and overall unpleasant to use on mobile while traveling on trains and busses between cell towers. Some of that can be attributed to ads but the reality is you don't need SPA's to serve news. Remix is cool in that it lets you develop like an app but serve like a website.

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

#82
post #76
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.

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

While that's possible, it's a lot more fault tolerant to use the declarative :hover rule, than it is to handle it procedurally. The browser knows how to handle odd pointing devices, touch states and won't ever have to deal with uncaught errors in a mouseover/mouseout event.

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

#83

> 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…

Yeah, I was just chatting with another principal eng friend recently where maybe a whole new generation of programmers may be several degrees away from topics like operating systems, compilers, computer security and networking.

Once in a while, (lower level) software needs to be rewritten as underlying invariants go out of fashion. Think filesystems due to hardware access patterns etc. - to unlock magnitudes of performance improvements. The scary part is maybe we'll never have enough programmers to know how to do "the hard stuff" anymore. I hope I'm proven wrong though!

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

#84
Many of the comments suggest that of course you wouldn't use React for a blog.

Someone forgot to tell these folks:

https://buttercms.com/blog/how-to-create-a-blog-with-react/

https://www.sanity.io/guides/build-your-first-blog-using-rea...

(and many more)

I'm firmly in the camp that React and similar frameworks are overused. However, the point is that there's a large part of our industry that is bought-in (and in many cases, built businesses around) the concept of "React all the things" and it's encouraging to see push back.

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

#86
I built my simple site with just Go, no libraries of any kind. Two years later it is such a dream to never ever have any dependency chores to do.

Before that I had a Phoenix site and I feel like every time I touched it (months apart) I had to update something.

Not such a big deal at work where monitoring for security vulnerabilities and updating dependencies is paid work that we make time for but I hate that kind of busy work on my own time.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not really in webdev, although I still do django sites for people sometimes, amazed and glad I had no idea that's how things had gone.

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

#88

> 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…

It depends on the intention of the person trying to learn. When someone is starting and asks to me which language/tech is best to start, I always ask, what do you want from learning tech? Are you comfortable with X salary? Do you want to make a career of it? Go international/remote? Etc.

I had some friends being honest about only wanting some good money, not top high, but in comfortable zone, and preferably fast, in less than a year. With that kinda of mentality, I usually recommend going straight to the most used stack where I live, React, Angular or Java.

They are usually just starting and want to feel the waters, I tell about the basics and link some online courses. Everyone can start on one tech and learn another later.

I myself learned frontend before high school and only had a formal education on software years later on college, and now I feel like pretty proficient on software as a whole. The answer to it, is usually giving some time and experience

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

#89
post #76
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.

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

There is no onHoverIn or onHoverOut in JS.

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

#90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PHP, ColdFusion, etc allows you to intermix HTML and variables without doing the type of escaping you're describing.

For instance, CFML:

#firstName# #lastName#

You can also write classes that return data and custom tags that return rendered html.

I'm not saying we need to go back to those languages necessarily, but I think there's a ton of misconception about how those languages can be used, and quite a bit of reinventing the wheel in the Javascript world.

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