201–210 of 366 posts
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I got asked if I had a blog in an interview. I am a software engineer not a self marketer.
I am a software engineer that loves to help others. Nothing to do with self-marketing, at least not intentionally, but a welcomed skill in the team. So the question makes sense to me.
At some point, when modules get "micro" enough, the effort of managing them and learning their usage outweighs the effort of implementing the thing yourself. Most JavaScript projects seem to walk that line quite closely. I'm a React developer at work, but I recently gave Vue a try at home. This is one of the things that most stood out to me about it. React makes a selling point out of the fact that it's "just renderi…
This problem is way deeper than web front ends. There were/are dozens of frameworks for Windows and Unix front ends too, before browsers were invented. Every year or two some new tool became popular which made all the previous ones obsolete.
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Ha! I'm not sure how serious this comment is in terms of how you choose to spend your time at work, but a person with that attitude isn't going to last long working for me. I expect them to deliver . I'm not a tyrant, and I avoid setting hard deadlines as much as reasonably possible, but I do expect concrete evidence of output that delivers customer and/or business value. Still, in many organisations I think you're r…
Someone with that attitude isn't going to last long working for you anyway: as soon as they're hired, they'll put your company on their resume, blog about everything they've learned, trump up their first project, and start looking for their next gig, usually getting a big pay increase in the process.
(I am not usually this cynical before lunchtime, honestly.)
Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…
All of this is why, in the end, more and more... I do things "the hard way". If I'm using a dynamic language WTF do I need an ORM for, if I understand enough to write an SQL command, and use a library for that DB that does parameterized queries? On the front end, I tend to lean towards abstractions that work together... I really like React and the material-ui library's switch to JSS. It's relatively clean, and useful…
I think it's mostly premature optimization. People think writing DTOs is challenging, so they want an ORM. But since you end up needing DTOs anwyays, removing SQL capabilities from the app means writing SQL in not SQL, and things like joins suddenly become slow and problematic and result in really heavy systems that are harder to change. For the joy of a quicker startup the entire project moves slower.
ORMs have their place, but in the majority of the systems I've seen they were unnecessary, and in broad terms don't provide any particular productivity advantage over using "dumb" SQL-based mapping solutions (a la Dapper [https://github.com/StackExchange/Dapper]), that preserve the power of SQL.
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I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.
Similar boat. I’ve been presenting passion projects to user groups / unconferences for a decade. Now, I wasn’t aware at the time but around 2013 seems like the turning point. I was getting tingles then. I never wanted to be a celebrity but it seems my aptitude has sent the wrong signals to some. I refuse to tow company lines, but acknowledge funding of open work or course. Starting to explore other outlets for sohpis…
I don't know if this is your intention, but your streaming platforms title may be sending different signals than you think: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spooge
FreshSpooge and iSpooge sound like awesome product names if you're working for MindGeek, tho ;)
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It's a problem for other communities, like Python. I read a blog post recently from a well known python dev where he talks about explicitly cultivating "fame" around his open source tools. My experience, as one who has tried to promote my own tools, is that literally nothing good will come of it for the community as a whole. It's a bad practice in my opinion. For example: https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228
What incentives would a someone have to invest a considerable amount of time in releasing and maintaining an open source project if they can't even use that to promote themselves?
Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…
This is a great comment and an amazing insight. What's particularly interesting is that people have attempted to collapse (almost?) every stage of that abstraction hierarchy individually, but none of them have been so successful as to take over the world. If you were writing a desktop application, you would still have at least three of the layers (serialized data on disk, in-memory data, and the rendering of the obje…
Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…
I've written about these issues many times before.
Regarding the problem with objects, I wrote "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End":
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...
Regarding the problems of HTML, I wrote "The problem with HTML":
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html
To answer the question "Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?" the answer is surely, in part, the fact that we refuse to build technologies that are designed to be great front-end technologies.