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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#361

Post by skydhash »

yawnxyz wrote: post #162
conorbergin wrote: post #27

When I made my first website I read things online like "svelte is better than react" and "solid-js will be the next big thing", and I thought this was an important part of web development. Newbies should read MDN and ignore everything else.

> Newbies should read MDN and ignore everything else. I think people forget how inaccessible it is for a newbie to start writing pure javascript directly from the API reference. People need tutorials and walkthroughs, and need to build a an internal understanding of how these all work. Frameworks help them abstract all that

> I think people forget how inaccessible it is for a newbie to start writing pure javascript directly from the API reference.

That's when you buy a book and try to do practice projects, and learn how everything works.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#362

Post by allenu »

I wonder how much of this has been driven by ZIRP, making companies a little bit more lax on what they were spending energy on. Teams are large and devs are decoupled from the end user and end result (PMs, designers, leads, managers have more say on the product being created). That, coupled with devs traditionally, IMO, being enamored by system design and wanting to create even more efficient systems for building things, and given that is the one thing they have direct control over (not the end user experience and product), they would naturally want to focus their efforts on improving their systems for building things, at the sake of missing out on the bigger picture, which is that rebuilding systems has a cost that does not directly translate into net user benefit.

When you're closer to improving the bottom line in terms of sales and user joy, I think there's a greater likelihood that you focus less on spending time rebuilding your platform to whatever is currently hot on the scene. (Not to mention internal promotions may be skewed towards clear engineering efforts vs. more qualitative user-perceived improvements.)

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#363

Post by flomo »

hajile wrote: post #247
zero_shift wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. It's just a meme. React has been around for eleven years now, and complaints about frontend churn started with the Angular 2 announcement (in late 2015)

Churn complaints are older than Angular 2. We'd gone through an entire cycle of churn around templating engines (mustache, handlebars, ejs, jade/pug, nunchucks, underscore, lodash). Gen 1 wars (up through 2010-ish), we had: jQuery-UI, Prototype, SproutCore, YUI, MooTools, Google Web Toolkit, Dojo, ExtJS, BackboneJS, etc. There were no survivors. Gen 2 wars (up through 2015-ish): Angular, KnockoutJS, Ember, Enyo, Reac…

There was also a huge bunch of completely forgotten ActionScript Flash stuff.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#364

Post by s1mplicissimus »

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.

If you think they are fun to watch, watch them for entertainment, but don't fool yourself into believing that this is "learning". Their content is the definition of "video on the most googled keywords of the day" and the quality is about what you would expect. just consider how much content they pump out and how much time it takes to actually get into any of the topics they "cover" on a daily switching basis.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#365

Post by skydhash »

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…

More often you inherit a stack and rarely you move away from it. And even if you jump on the latest infrastructure trends, there will probably be enough enterprise customers that they will support it for a while.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#366

Post by s1mplicissimus »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #324
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.

Primeagen and Theo is pure brain rot.

Idk Theo reminds me so heavily of a "freelance frontend developer" I had to bear with on my team for a while. Eventually even my manager caught on to how pretentious and incompetent he was, so luckily it was a short intermezzo. An opinion on everything but not a clue of anything

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#367

Post by bloomingkales »

uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #357
bloomingkales wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a nuanced topic. If we want to dive in, I can provide a glimpse into the first layer of the anus as we stick our head into it. When we shepherded a lot of sheep into frontend via these courses and boot camps and quasi courses/bootcamps in the form of certain frameworks (hey, you only know this one framework?), we created a cohort of something . Now what is that something? It’s not really the tinkerer that loves…

I don't believe you want to have a productive conversation about this. It sounds like you just want to be angry.

Okay? I'm having a lot of fun talking about some of the parts of our circus. I can't change anything. There will be new cult leaders (evangelists) for frameworks, and new cohorts, we can't change the past. Just pay attention to the rough framework (no pun intended, swear) as it happens again, and try our best to call it out, because it didn't always lead to great outcomes.

Money will be made on all sides regardless and we will all be fine financially. I'm talking about something else, inner. The infinite anus, asshole, is real - but now I'm just projecting.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#368

Post by skydhash »

lo_fye wrote: post #273

I once read an article that promoted putting all of your business logic in the database, in the form of stored procedures, functions, etc. I thought the author was completely insane, until I kept reading. "You can change frontends any time you want, or you can run multiple frontends simultaneously. Everything important, including validation, is handled by the database." Have I done it? No... but that opened my mind t…

> You can change frontends any time you want, or you can run multiple frontends simultaneously. Everything important, including validation, is handled by the database.

Or you can properly architecture your application and move the logic layer to a language with better tooling.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#369

Post by kunzhi »

jasode wrote: post #301
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…

>, 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 really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. I like (some) programming videos and I'll give my perspective as someone…

I'm not sure if this is what you intended, but I read this as a great argument in favor of pair programming.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#370

Post by anonzzzies »

squidsoup wrote: post #354
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #172

I have fallen in love with the simplicity of Rails recently. Sprinkle a bit of stimulus where you really need it. Hell slap a turbo here or there. And other than that? Pure HTML. It’s downright lovely. And it’ll still work fine 20 years from now.

Sure, but then your company grows large enough to want its own design system, and you have multiple applications that need shared components. How do you implement that in rails?

Never had those issues. It is just frontend job protection blah. No one should listen to it really.
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