111–120 of 153 posts
I understand this is opinionated and "personal", but on the off chance that this might make React less intimidating, let me chime in and say that you can do professional work (and build pretty much any reasonable application) without: - really understanding "semantic HTML" (if you know what div's and span's are, you're ready to get to work), - understanding flexbox (you can, and many pro developers do, just use a CSS…
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As one grows old we learn to avoid learning every new fad until dust settles. I saved a few brain cells by not bothering with GWT, CoffeeScript, mootools, YUI, prototype...
That's silly. GWT was a solid platform for quite a large number of years, and is still used in quite a large number of enterprises. Also, there are a lot of good ideas in there that the JS community is only just catching up to, like dead code elimination. A lot of modern javascript/typescript syntax is inspired by CoffeeScript. And CS is so trivially easy to learn that "saved a few brain cells" sounds like intellectu…
I'm not saying that job offers requiring e.g. coffeescript don't exist, I'm asking how much more likely you are to find a job that suits you because you know coffeescript?
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That's really stretching the definition of "professional work". If you're just gluing third party components and libraries together you're going to end up with a bloated mess. This is why javascript/front-end developers get so much flak - there is a prevailing opinion that you can just fake it and not bother to learn best practices, not bother to test, and not bother to care about performance. If you do not consisten…
If you've invested the time to derive a first-principles understanding of why every element in a React environment works the way it does, and what the alternatives are, and why you're going to use any given alternative, I can understand being irritated with the idea that there's a happy path that people can traverse to get to your level of productivity with 1/50th the amount of effort. What I don't really get is the…
The problem is that (if there really is such a happy path) it’s different for every person, dependent on that person’s previous experience, and impossible to determine until you know all the other stuff. You don’t know what you don’t know, and somebody who’s advising you ALSO doesn’t know what you don’t know.
I’ve tried, over and over again, to “just do it” instead of taking things slowly and deliberately (especially because I always have a boss breathing down my neck to “get it done already”) and I always run into completely inexplicable stack traces that Google and StackOverflow can’t help me with. (Or is it just me?). However, when I finally bite the bullet and take the “hit” for the lost productivity spent reading the documentation, working through smaller, simpler examples before building up to the “real” production application, everything is clear, the stack traces make sense, and the application works like it should. The only problem is having to account to the merciless time tracking system for the week or two that I “wasted” on something as trivial as “learning”.
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As one grows old we learn to avoid learning every new fad until dust settles. I saved a few brain cells by not bothering with GWT, CoffeeScript, mootools, YUI, prototype...
Now is a good time to learn front-end tech. Skipping YUI was good, but you should learn at least one of Mithril, React, Preact, Inferno. I recommend Mithril for learning and React for job opportunities. It's OK to have skipped CoffeeScript, but you don't want to skip TypeScript in 2018. The past couple of years have been good as it has increasingly harmonized with ES6.
I understand this is opinionated and "personal", but on the off chance that this might make React less intimidating, let me chime in and say that you can do professional work (and build pretty much any reasonable application) without: - really understanding "semantic HTML" (if you know what div's and span's are, you're ready to get to work), - understanding flexbox (you can, and many pro developers do, just use a CSS…
I have no idea what "professional work" could possibly mean in that sentence. The things that you have deemed superfluous are the tools of the trade. We don't use every tool on every job, but when we do use them, its because they make our work easier! Someone who doesn't know that lodash exists will reinvent lodash, and do it poorly because JS has crazy edge cases. Someone who hasn't experienced Bootstrap's crazy, ne…
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Modern programming languages are a lot more featureful and sophisticated than assembly language, and they change a lot more than instruction set architectures do. How is your lament different than that of an assembly language programmer, who might complain "crazy how far we've come from conditional jumps and some stack manipulation"? I'm 41 and got started in the 1990s, and those assembly advocates really did exist.…
There was a time when compiled languages compiled into a somewhat predictable finite sequence of machine instruction, and thus one might use them but still understand everything happening. I think that is less true of modern web frameworks.
Time to move to custom middleware(s)
I don't know if this roadmap really is useful - most developers only work with a subset of the things listed there. This seems especially aimed at more junior developers in general, but looks like it would just overwhelm/confuse them.
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If you've invested the time to derive a first-principles understanding of why every element in a React environment works the way it does, and what the alternatives are, and why you're going to use any given alternative, I can understand being irritated with the idea that there's a happy path that people can traverse to get to your level of productivity with 1/50th the amount of effort. What I don't really get is the…
> there’s a happy path The problem is that (if there really is such a happy path) it’s different for every person, dependent on that person’s previous experience, and impossible to determine until you know all the other stuff. You don’t know what you don’t know, and somebody who’s advising you ALSO doesn’t know what you don’t know. I’ve tried, over and over again, to “just do it” instead of taking things slowly and d…