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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#291

Post by cpursley »

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…

And what have you put out into the world?

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#292

Post by nine_k »

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.…

Plain HTML and plain CSS (well, maybe with SASS) are pretty great.

Plain JS loses much to plain Typescript though, to my mind.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#293

Post by bloomingkales »

cpursley wrote: post #291
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…

And what have you put out into the world?

I called out a grifter.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#294

Post by rcleveng »

homebrewer wrote: post #278
rcleveng wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still using npm and wasn't sure if I should use yarn or pnmp, is there a clear winner here on this one? Is there an authoritative place to know which ways the winds of change are blowing on this? I ask since both of them (yarn and pnpm) have recent releases within the last days and weeks.

pnpm saves a lot of disk space by reusing packages and hardlinking (or reflinking if your filesystem supports that) from a single global directory. It's fully transparent for you. Optionally, it can also use a strict mode (or whatever it's called) where you can only access packages that are explicitly mentioned in your dependency list. Really helps with preventing you from accidentally creating unexpended ties to you…

Cool, thanks! I've not anything this succinct between them before.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#295

Post by cxr »

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…

> Meanwhile in JS it seems like you can’t go more than six months without having to rewrite something.

And by "in JS", you really mean, "in NPM land".

So long as folks keep remaining seemingly (almost willfully) ignorant of the source of their pain and/or running right back into the fire the next time the opportunity presents itself, that pain is going to continue.

NPM sucks. It's not the way to do JS. Everyone who has ever experienced it and then written a complaint about it should be more than willing to accept this. For whatever reason, though, they aren't. (My hypothesis? They like being able to write about their pain because it gives them something and someone to kvetch about/to. See Aurornis above/below on the role of social media and influence in "FE" (i.e. browser-focused software development), and Alex Danco's "Making is Show Business Now" https://alexdanco.com/2020/10/08/making-is-show-business-now...>.)

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#296

Post by cyberax »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #237
hombre_fatal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI. Then you'd make a more sensible comparison like React versus something like SwiftUI which is constantly changing, constantly breaking, and still basically in beta mode for 10 years, yet it only runs on specific versions of Apple hardware and software. And usually it's so insuffi…

"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI." "People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it" Tech like: - Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments? - Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major re…

On the other hand, I can write a very complicated graphics-related app in React+tons_of_libs within _days_. It took me months to do that in Win32 API in 2005.

The developer velocity enabled by React is insane.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#297

Post by GitPushOrigin »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #176
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 also don't think these front end influencers are even coding very much. Like if you hired them on a job on a serious team, they would probably come off like a junior engineer

I get that same vibe. It seems like their intent is to "wow" others into thinking how easy it is to become a developer and build an app with X framework. When in reality they just built a todo app that barely resembles how real software is built.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#298

Post by SCNP »

HankStallone wrote: post #252
ninininino wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best programming videos I've seen are ones where someone just pointed a camera at a teacher in a classroom setting, like the Programming Paradigms series Jerry Cain did at Stanford some years ago. No attempt to add entertainment value, just a teacher, students, and chalkboards. I wish I could find more content like that, especially about newer stuff.

Have you checked out https://ocw.mit.edu/ ? They have a ton of MIT courses online for free in the format you just described.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#299

Post by roflyear »

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.

Yeah, agreed - but I do think using vue, react, whatever on certain pages really has its benefits. Sometimes a UI really is improved by using features that Vue makes really easy to implement.

Of course it's possible without Vue - but you have to do a lot more work in many cases... so, what's the point?

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#300

Post by proc0 »

I think there's a big part of the picture being missed here. Frontend is bad because of how the industry treats frontend engineering, and web engineering overall. Companies will make engineers do way more than just focus on the code and build things properly and correctly. This is why they all gravitate towards the new, shiny library and over time the ecosystem is a huge mess of dozens upon dozens of libraries just to build something simple. They want engineers to be more like a technical entrepreneur, thinking about how to add value to the business, and this comes at the expense of building things properly and correctly.

> On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it’s a big part of why we’re seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can’t.

Yes, because they're not allowed to just code. It's no longer enough for the role, and the expectations include everything from talking to stakeholders, to crafting the requirements, to testing, releasing, and doing the telemetry and analyticis. Obviously nobody will have the focus or time to build anything properly this way, and they will always choose to use external libraries instead of making something from scratch that will fit the domain space and will allow full control to build something with no bugs.

It's amazing how the industry has accepted that bugs are normal, and part of building frontends, when good engineering should mean that you are able to build and ship something with almost zero bugs. The industry has changed the role and steered it away from what engineering is supposed to be, which is building things properly, and now people are scratching their heads as to why we have such bad software and everything is so complicated on the frontend.

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