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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

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Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#11
From the list, I would suggest to learn C, because a lot of stuff is written in it or at least uses its ABI. So understanding that will give you a lot of leverage.

Besides that, a deep dive into operating systems (yes, that means to get rid of MacOS if you use it) will give you a solid foundation to understand networking, containers and even more.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#12
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

If your speciality is frontend JS engineering, why are deployment, platforms, and networking (unless you simply mean how to use fetch/XMLHttpRequest) large holes? I'd even question graphics APIs beyond very basic knowledge, because in my experience I've never needed to know anything about those beyond the basics. These things sound more like full stack, rather than frontend.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#13
post #5
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

Well it makes perfect sense to me why React keeps reinventing the wheel every other version and why it's a hot mess. This video makes more sense now as to why they don't seem to have any direction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRo18pUs61Q . Frontend web development shouldn't consume braincells and React reeks of shortsightedness.

That video is quite poor in my opinion. He comes so close to a bunch of very interesting questions like how can state management and effect management be done in a good, scalable way that maybe isn't tied to our view libraries? He then admits he has close to no opinion on the matter and suggests web components which is about a step above the jQuery scenario he described in the beginning.

The way I see it the advent of React was basically a rejection of the imperative MVC model that was prevalent with the likes of Backbone in favor of a more functional one. The first prototype of React was written in Standard ML. The evolution over the years with flux, redux and hooks was basically answering the questions that were arguably solved in MVC already but coming from the angle of declarative, immutable approaches. Where does state live? How do I handle asynchronous effects? How do I abstract that behavior from my views?

I don't think the community has answered those questions definitively yet and a lot of the interest seems to be in refining the view mechanics with the likes of Svelte rather than really getting to grips with how to best handle long lived application state and the effects that operate on it.

One thing I could see being the case in a couple of years, and in some ways the video does reach this conclusion, is that the reactive, stateful layer will be abstracted from the view and how you render your data will be almost like choosing a templating engine on the server. It could be React, Vue, Svele, Marko, Web Components, whatever. Those libraries and components will handle your dropdowns opening and closing and your tooltips showing but your real application state that distinguishes your product from another will live somewhere else and will be less subject to churn.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#14
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

I mean, this is Dan Abramov we’re talking about. Ya know, the guy who created a good chunk of React.

I’d say he built actual products for the web just fine.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#15
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

I think the point is that frontend engineering is a broad field, and everyone had gaps in their knowledge, especially specialists who focus on specific parts of the stack. It's possible to provide a ton of value on very complex frontends without doing much in the way of CSS, for example. I've been part of projects where the UI layer was handled in a dedicated library, and unless you wanted to be part of that team, you didn't have to understand much more than which React components to use when. Graphics are a specific subfield of frontend that isn't relevant to most apps, and it's possible to go very far without being exposed to these.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#16
Reading this list made me really want to explain the basics of each of those items so as to clear up any misconceptions, or to confirm that, yes, he gets the gist of it.

When I try to learn about topics that I'm unfamiliar with, the hardest information to find is "Why is X important?" and "What is the most important thing to know about X?"

With those in hand, I'd be able to determine if a deep dive into the topic is useful for me or not.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#19
post #10
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

I don't think you're a gatekeeper, I just don't see the relevance to the author. He's a library designer and is working with a team maintaining and updating one of the most popular Javascript libraries in the world. He has a very deep background in that language which is one of the most important skills for his role. I don't blame him for not knowing some of those things you listed more deeply. There's only so many h…

Seconded, also reading the list, it's likely he just delved deep enough to solve the issue at hand and then back to work.

I can relate to that a bit, especially CORS since I never bothered to see what was up with that at a deep level either. Honestly just used a module for Flask when needed to get it working there and set up a CORS proxy on a cloudflare worker for a different project and called it a day.

Maybe that's how it went with him too. I'd call this something like "Laze Driven Development"—learning just enough to solve the problem (like my experiences with bash scripts).

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#20
post #2

YMMV and I know I’ll be judged a gatekeeper, but not knowing: networking, modern CSS, some familiarity with SASS, CORS, basic deployment / platforms, and graphics APIs (!) all seem like pretty gaping holes for a frontend engineer - you’ll most definitely need those when building actual products for the web.

That's nonsense.

The guy is a specialist. That's like asking Lionel Messi to also be good at goalkeeping.

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