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

clairefro.dev

101–110 of 192 posts

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

#102

I've tried learning Ember, React, and Vue and have tapped out pretty early. Now I'm learning how to build a site using only vanilla JS and doing everything from scratch unless I find a reason to switch it. I think I'm making decent progress. I even wrote my own simple test framework that shoves the results on the bottom of a page. After adding a few features I decided to switch it to Jasmine. One thing I'm noticing i…

Ditto on Ember, React, Vue and Elm. Was a jQuery minimalist, nut now moved on to Haxe-HTML5. Yes, it compiles Haxe to JS. But the JS it generates maps back to the Haxe very simply, and it's straightforward to debug in Chromium dev tools. There a nice declarative XML system for widget layout. It's up to you to choose how much you do declaratively, and how much in .hx code.

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

#103

Author made a two page static website without React. Okay? Congrats?

Actually, yes. The conventional wisdom these days is to do everything in React (or something similarly bloated).

Because, you know, users just love seeing a bunch of grey boxes shimmer and dance on a white background for several seconds before the magic really starts to happen.

So any exercise which demonstrates that there just might be an alternative to this philosophy should be applauded.

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

#104

> 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 perfo…

This is sort of a FUD argument IMO. There will always be people who focus on low level software engineering. There will always be people who want to learn about the hardware of computers much more than the software. Proportionally there will almost certainly be less (we don't need nearly as many computer engineers as we do software engineers) but as long as the salaries remain competitive there will be plenty.

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

#105

> 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…

And that's why learning is best left as an individual pursuit. For me, it is always best to start with a complex system and then work backwards, understanding the thoughts and decisions that went into each step along the way. When I start with the basics I don't get a feel for the bigger picture and it means nothing. I'm glad I've only been around the industry for 25-some-odd years. We already had many high level abs…

I hate to break it to you but if you've been in the professional world for 25 years, you're old :)

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

#106
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reinve…

Sure, of course you can in some contexts and with many asterisks (though in PHP it is literally text munging and that's what you get).

But even, granting your correction: in the CF example you're writing representation and logic in two separate contexts. JSX does not do that. JSX is JavaScript and the constructs that JavaScript provides work without fail with the constructed trees (which need not be DOM trees, e.g. react-three-fiber) you're generating. It puts a lot of strain on the assertion that you must-repeat-must separate these concerns, which hasn't been materially true really at any point in my career all the way back to JSP or Velocity templates where (much like ColdFusion) you had worse tools for one context than you got for free with the other.

While JSX and something like CFML (or hell, Angular) look similar when you squint, this is a different thing. The closest equivalent is something like Scala or Visual Basic XML literals, which never took off; JSX is no-bullshit a step change in consistency and productivity and it's awesome.

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

#107

It's a portfolio, is js really necessary?

Javascript is the new Python in many shops.

So while one doesn't have to know JS, it will definitely get you through a lot of doors. And not knowing it, or being too stubborn to keep your skills in it polished will keep you in the doghouse.

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

#108
post #48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That statement indicates you don't know why react was developed.

> That statement indicates you don't know why react was developed. Why was it developed?

Hint: it was not because the performance nor the JS language limitations. You can google the rest.

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

#109
> My portfolio needs to be nothing more than the HTTP equivalent of a tri-fold brochure.

My concern here is that your website _is_ your portfolio - including how you build it. It's not just the content and long narrative that's going to sell you. This new approach has switched from showing what you can do to telling what you can do.

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

#110

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.

I use React for static sites and really enjoy it.

* as it’s simplest, it’s a really easy to use templating tool.

* there are a tools that compile to mostly static HTML, so not performance hits

* theres almost always something that pushes you to want some JS. React is handy to have. It also opens the door to all of the the community packages. No sense to re-invent the wheel.

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