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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#531

Post by [deleted] »

nophunphil wrote: post #517
tshaddox wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're mistaken. I can't comment on the quality of Kent C. Dodds' educational content, but his formal affiliation with Remix was short-lived. The courses that he sells have no apparent affiliation with Remix (the open source project or the company). Incidentally, Remix is an open source project started by the React Router devs to create more framework features around React Router. React Router is probably one…

> React Router is probably one of the most widely deployed JavaScript libraries ever and is the furthest thing imaginable from a project created by grifters to sell online courses. This is a funny example (to me) because in 2017, one of the two co-creators of React Router (Michael) came to my job and gave a two or three-day in-person training course on React. I think he also covered Redux and React Router. We had a g…

[deleted]

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#532

Post by nextts »

> People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away.

This might be the solution in many cases. For small projects vanilla js is quite pleasant to use.

For bigger projects React helps structure things for sure. I am for "vanilla react", or prop drilling, hooks and context. No state libraries or fancy shit.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#533

Post by micheleAM »

A wise man once wrote, "There is nothing new under the sun" (King Solomon, ~2500 years ago), but the frontend cult refuses to accept that. They reinvent the wheel multiple times a year, failing to realize they are going in circles. Every so-called "new" thing falls victim to the Pareto principle — it solves only 80% of the problems introduced by the last shiny thing, meaning progress is merely asymptotic.

They also seem oblivious to the short history of programming. In general, there are three main branches: imperative, functional, and logic programming — with the latter two being built on imperative foundations. Yet the frontend cult acts as if they're groundbreaking by introducing pattern matching via discriminated unions in TypeScript, a concept that has existed in functional and logic programming for over 50 years.

In other words, they behave like brats.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#534

Post by nextts »

bob1029 wrote: post #80
antirez wrote: post #9

To jump off the treadmill is not using a fronted framework: at all, and not using a random one and not rewriting the code later. Server side rendering, JavaScript only when needed, no separation between backend and frontend folks in the company.

> no separation between backend and frontend folks in the company. This is the biggest gain available anywhere. When you have one engineer who is empowered to write SQL specifically crafted to pull the exact columns required to SSR a web view (which they are also responsible for), you don't need to spend a single second thinking about APIs or ORMs or whatever. You just need to know SQL and modern vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.…

Ah yes. That is brilliant until it isn't. For any reasonably complex business problem you will run into:

* Performance issues: table scans, high memory usage for joins, crazy sql execution plans, lock contention

* Security problems: especially around authorisation. Who can see what data. You'll start to need rules engines written as stored procedure or some shit.

* Business logic: can a SQL work out the country city, state and federal tax for the address? Maybe it can. Maybe that query will grind the system to a halt. Maybe you'll slap redis and 1000 sql replications. Maybe you are no longer just doing SQL!

Yeah fortunately for all of us shit is complicated and needs bespoke thinking to solve each problem.

There are problems where your ideas work well (typically consumer facing startup types who can rewrite when they raise a bit more money).

If that is how you do things I know the conversations you'll be having next year already. And that is from just ORM abuse not even front end SQL.

I tried to use Firebase in earnest which is the ultimate in that approach and it is awful. You hit a bunch of new and worse problems because you don't want anything to do with an EC2.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#535

Post by bibstha »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #172

I have fallen in love with the simplicity of Rails recently. Sprinkle a bit of stimulus where you really need it. Hell slap a turbo here or there. And other than that? Pure HTML. It’s downright lovely. And it’ll still work fine 20 years from now.

I maintain an app that was originally written in 2011 in Rails, and a lot of old code looks very similar to what we have in Rails 2025. It's very easy to dig into existing code. Feels really good.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#536

Post by switch007 »

throwaway92432 wrote: post #437
mplanchard wrote: post #2

I have recently been doing some upgrades to the build system for our FE code to swap out yarn for pnpm. I’m normally a backend engineer, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the JS mines. The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated . Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally d…

Many bring the same mindset to backend as well. In my small team of less than 10 developers we use C#, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Elixir, Go, Javascript, Typescript, and Python to worry about and maintain because developers have been allowed to pick what they want. I have stopped caring about how incredibly short sighted this is, and just think of it as experience that improves my resume

> because developers have been allowed to pick what they want.

That's a technical leadership failure first and foremost

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#537

Post by throwaway2037 »

Swizec wrote: post #477
koreth1 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. Me either, but I have a hunch about why. Are you a fast reader? I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere c…

Alternatively: you can listen to audio while commuting or driving or cleaning or working out. I love audio for higher level things and to get an overview of the topic. Then text to dive into the details.

Another big driver to move from text to video: It is easier to monetise video via YouTube compared to a blog. People with millions of subscriptions on YouTube aren't creating FE learning material out of the goodness of their hearts; it is a big business. Also, video is almost always lower information density compared to text, so it is easier for your net to capture more customers.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#538

Post by switch007 »

fragmede wrote: post #33
mplanchard wrote: post #2

I have recently been doing some upgrades to the build system for our FE code to swap out yarn for pnpm. I’m normally a backend engineer, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the JS mines. The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated . Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally d…

Wait, we're supposed to use pnpm now? What happened to yarn? What's wrong with npm? I stop paying attention for six months and even the installer has changed. What's an npx?

But first you need corepack because globally installing yarn is BAD

Corepack is marked experimental but trust us bro

oh if you don't have corepack just install it globally (this is fine)

If you do have it, you have to opt into the experiment by running "corepack enable"

So simple

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#539

Post by Auracle »

kamaal wrote: post #502
mplanchard wrote: post #2

I have recently been doing some upgrades to the build system for our FE code to swap out yarn for pnpm. I’m normally a backend engineer, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the JS mines. The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated . Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally d…

>>The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated. I build a lot of FE stuff for internal company tooling. Production, monitoring, dashboards etc. Its crazy how the React ecosystem works. Like you can come back after two years to add a feature and realise you now face weeks/months of migrations tasks before you even begin to add the features. I always com…

I’m getting back into development after being a photographer for the last 10 years and after reading your comment I thought “maybe I should apply at a bank…”

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#540

Post by ncpop »

Probably a little more than 10 years ago I made a project with Django and Angular 1.x. I had a look at it again recently and managed to update Django to v5 with very little effort. The front-end however would obviously need to be completely rewritten.
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