Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Frontend Treadmill

polotek.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 722 posts

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#211

Post by koakuma-chan »

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.…

> I think the end game is doing SSR of web content inside the RDBMS

OR just embed the RDBMS into your application!

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#212

Post by dekhn »

I've proposed an idea several times that I think might resolve this situation, but it's never received any real uptake and I can see some serious issues with the approach.

Instead of building a "inner system" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect) where the browser uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create interactive applications, or attempting to make a sandboxed and highly limited execution environment (WebAssembly), browser tabs should be Virtual Machines- in the sense that VMWare, KVM, and HyperV are VMs, not in the sense that some language runtimes are VMs.

Think about it: every tab on your machine could be its own little machine running a full stack and rendering the output to a framebuffer (the tab window content). It provides precisely the sandboxing and virtual IO that existing VMs have already implemented and optimized.

But of course, if you do this, you don't actually need a browser window with tabs: you just render the application to a standalone window. But then really what value does the browser provide, other than giving you some convenient runtime for accessible web resources? So just put the browser runtime in the operating system and host applications within virtual machines. Nothing stops you from building applications using web frameworks- you can still use javascript, HTML, and CSS if you want, within or seperate from existing high quality graphics application frameworks (like Qt, GTK, etc).

Those reading carefully will note this is exactly what (some) operating systems have been capable of doing for longer than the WWW has existed, and all major operating systems now support this natively (KVM, HyperV, Apple Hypervisor) and they also all embed full browser capability in native libraries. The main issue I see is that there are now 2 or 3 hardware architetures (x86, arm, risc-v) and a VM does not directly resolve performance issues of cross-arch translation, so devs would still need to produce binary packages for 2-3 archectures to reach the level of cross-OS compatibility that browsers currently support.

I work frequently with Qt and it's amazing how much better it is for building powerful, complex applications that have long term support.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#213

Post by pjmlp »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
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…

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’m amazed at how much of this is driven by the FE influencers. The FE world has embraced social media, YouTube, and even Twitch to a degree that I haven’t seen in other domains. Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always…

Yeah, back in my day being an "influencer" required being able to crack copy protection mechanisms and add an intro into the loading screen, or animations deemed impossible in the given hardware, while remaining anonymous behind a group handle.

With fame being slowly propagated via tapes and floppies sent by mail, or some BBS archives.

Now you comment on what others do, or commit single function packages.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#214

Post by iamleppert »

Make no mistake, the engineers who come in and want to immediately change to another framework, that is purely by design and an organizational play. The goal is to have the team switch to an unfamiliar framework, but one you know well, so you can divide and conquer the team's productivity. It's a great promotion strategy when you're a newcomer with high productivity while the rest of the team is struggling.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#215

Post by bloomingkales »

ewzimm wrote: post #171
Aurornis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’m amazed at how much of this is driven by the FE influencers. The FE world has embraced social media, YouTube, and even Twitch to a degree that I haven’t seen in other domains. Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always…

That's fascinating, and I had no idea web dev influencers were so big. I checked, and there really are people with millions of followers doing development. Personally, the idea of learning anything related to coding through a video is extremely frustrating. It's a text medium. I want to look at things, take time, think it over, compare code, follow references, look up functions. That people like video formats isn't r…

Here's one:

https://remix.run/

These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :(

And they just promote it and promote it:

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix

https://kentcdodds.com/courses

Pure grift. But since most people are decent people they don't know and fall for it, and something like this influencer emerges. They have entire Discords of customers, the same as crypto scams.

Edit: I don't know why people would downvote calling out a notable grifter in a thread that extended out to a discussion about influencers. WHICH influencers? Are we scared of that topic? The climate of the JS ecosystem didn't happen accidently.

People fall victim to this shit right here on HN, and then write blog posts about what the fuck is wrong with frontend:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39453767

(This entire thread reads like deliberate testimonials.)

Stop buying this stuff.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#216

Post by numinoid »

bloomingkales wrote: post #215
ewzimm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating, and I had no idea web dev influencers were so big. I checked, and there really are people with millions of followers doing development. Personally, the idea of learning anything related to coding through a video is extremely frustrating. It's a text medium. I want to look at things, take time, think it over, compare code, follow references, look up functions. That people like video formats isn't r…

Here's one: https://remix.run/ These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :( And they just promote it and promote it: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix https://kentcdodds.com/courses Pure grift. But since most peo…

Not sure it's fair to characterize a repo with 6k + commits and the last being 10 hours ago as "pure grift".

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#217

Post by bloomingkales »

ninininino wrote: post #208
Aurornis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’m amazed at how much of this is driven by the FE influencers. The FE world has embraced social media, YouTube, and even Twitch to a degree that I haven’t seen in other domains. Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always…

I'm only recently getting into some of the dev influencer stuff (and enjoying watching some!), I've discovered Primeagen and Theo but that's about it. Are you willing to name some names? I am trying to still form my mental model about these people and what I should pay attention to and what I should ignore.

You should ignore all of it. They mostly sell the idea of a developer to you, the same with any marketing. That's what an influencer does, they make you feel good about buying a cheap identity.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#218

Post by lezojeda »

the_other wrote: post #91
figassis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a BE engineer when that happened, I had just started to become proficient in it, coming from Angular. I threw in the towel and went back to my backend world of peace and happiness. So he's not alone, these deprecations are insane.

Front-end dev here. I hear from the b/e people about containers, serverless, lambdas, ORMs, queues, schedulers, caches, pipelines (ok, I use these too), databases, API gateways. Oh, but it's podman now, not Docker. And they're moving everything off AWS to Azure. And there's three versions of the API my f/e needs to talk to still in production. And every micro-service depends on a different version of Node. Apart from…

[dead]

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#219

Post by RobKohr »

only-one1701 wrote: post #65
8s2ngy wrote: post #58

I have given this a lot of thought, and I haven't been able to come up with any reasonable long-term solution that avoids major refactors or swapping out libraries and tools. I am leaning toward pairing React with React Router for creating server-side rendered web apps. My thinking is that React has "won" the JavaScript wars, maintaining its popularity consistently over the past decade, and React Router is one of the…

So I mostly agree with you, but I think there's some real dissatisfaction with React and Remix/React-Router's emphasis on SSR. If you don't care about SEO, there's really not that much SSR gives you that CSR doesn't. React and Remix seem to have gone all-in on SSR, and I just don't quite understand why.

Yeah, I like have an express or python backend that just is the api. I know I can test and validate what comes out easily, and control auth from there.

The backend is the real app, and the frontend is the ui peice.

With a solid backend, you can yank out the FE and replace it, or have it power some other apps easily. You can identify issues, and not have to traverse much code to get to them.

Your browser network tools will quickly help you identify if your problem is on the backend or the frontend regarding data.

SSR, well it is like going back to PHP days. The problem could be anywhere in the codebase.

If SEO is important, then yeah, it becomes an issue, but in that case I think periodic caching of client side rendered code to make it so that it shows that to the crawlers works best.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#220

Post by bloomingkales »

numinoid wrote: post #216
bloomingkales wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one: https://remix.run/ These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :( And they just promote it and promote it: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix https://kentcdodds.com/courses Pure grift. But since most peo…

Not sure it's fair to characterize a repo with 6k + commits and the last being 10 hours ago as "pure grift".

I think that adds to my point. How does that have so many stars on github? The customers "star" it. Who uses this on a real app? It's alright to slowly accept the bitter truth that grifting scales.
Post reply on HN