The Frontend Treadmill • Hacker News Board

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#421

Post by jmulho » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

proc0 wrote: post #303

mangodrunk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. The BE / FE split has been a really bad experiment. It has exasperated the issue where the FE is overly complex because there are people on a FE team, so they toil away and just add complexity. It is also problematic that we have so many people who only know web development and nothing else.

It's not an experiment though. The divide is clear, you have a client application, and then server applications that the client talks to. This is even more true if you want a lot of interactivity. This line isn't going away anytime soon. There will always be an application that runs on the edge device or machine, and it needs to talk to some other application to store and retrieve data.

The secret is to make the thing that runs on the backend the application, and the thing that runs on the edge device the user interface.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#422

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

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…

I get shorts in my feed and it’s all Front End developers. It’s all stupid JS behaviour and other inconsequential stuff.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#423

Post by connorpeters » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #374

Just use Angular and stop worrying. Batteries included, it works and works well. Yes there was a big change from v1 to v2, but we are at v19 now I think and upgrades are pretty painless IME (I generally don't even really notice them happening, and there is even a tool to help know what changed: https://angular.dev/update-guide ) I've been using it at BigCos now for years and it's really just totally fine, and importa…

+1 for Angular, upgrading has always been very easy and somewhere since V15 or so the build times have gotten insanely fast. Hot reloading a largeish cross-platform app with WASM takes less than 3 seconds. Deploys are also very simple.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#424

Post by zeroq » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

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…

This.

I have a pet project (let's call it home brew Plex) that I've started some 10 years ago and every 2 years I come back to it with the same experiment - let's see what do I have to change to be in line with the current javascript trends.

And every time it leads to a complete rewrite.

And I'm not talking about changing Angular to React -- I'm talking about fundamental shifts in paradigm, tooling that falls apart, and a brand new feature that everyone has to use this season.

The paradox is that I've started my career 25 years ago doing frontend - in flash, as JS was almost noexistent in it's current form back then - and still when I have to do small eyecandy or experiment I like to use plain old ES3/ES5 JS that I can author in a notepad and run directly in a browser without needing a tooling pipeline that would put a blush on most game developers.

I think it partially comes from the fact that JS as a modern, full fledged programming language came out of the blue, with sudden demise of flash, catching everyone by surprise.

I remember when companies started shifting to js and asking for senior frontend programmers back in the days. I was thinking to myself - hey, if you want someone with 5 yoe with JS in 2013 then most people in the market will be experts on jquery plugins, not serious programming.

And I think that's the reason why the community as a whole keeps reinventing the wheel and trying to prove themselves so hard.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#425

Post by notnmeyer » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

all i know is that nextjs is the absolute worst

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#426

Post by JamesonNetworks » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #389

JamesonNetworks wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading to standalone components and the new signal API right now, not sure I’d say this avoids the frontend treadmill

standalone for us was piecemeal - just do it one by one line of code here or there when you are already in the component making other changes. Likewise signals it was trivial to just change @Input() to input (ok slight simplification but not by much - I think there are automated scripts to do it anyway if you want to do it in one fell swoop?) when already in a component making changes. But you didn't have to , which…

You may not have to today, but you will one day. They will remove zone.js and there will be a whole host of deprecated libraries and outdated blog posts about how to do things the “angular” way. If the vite dev server didnt feel so much snappier, I would lament it, however, I think overall its a nice change. And sure, just change components while you are in there, but this is for my blog libraries I work on in my spare time. A lot of the standalone stuff just feels like change for change sake and the scripts did not run against a library project. I tried to dig into the @angular/cli repo to try and figure out what was going on, but after reading a few classes noped out and just converted by hand. Only takes a couple of hours or a day to test, but thats 0 productivity time. Change detection is different now and leveraging ngOnChanges is def broken now, zone js removal is experimental, and all of it so Angular becomes more like React as far as I can tell. My new projects are Django with templates and post backs. Its a breath of fresh air.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#427

Post by zeroq » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

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…

This correlates to my parent post - when my generation started with Flash around 2000 there was no literature on how to programm in Flash, it just happened.

So we went to the nearest bookstore and got a bunch of other books on programming. For many Flash developers the bible was Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. Most of the source materials for game programming (and that was a lion share of Flash programming) was in C++.

I'm not claiming that we were smarter, but by sheer coincidence, most people, even folks like me who skipped school, had very solid fundamentals. And partially due to the fact that it wasn't that lucrative back then.

Today most people don't care, IT is just easy money, kids have short attention span and trends are tailored by tiktok videos. All in all, it's just a fashion driven developement.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#428

Post by JamesonNetworks » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

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…

My experience with this at one company is the DB became a wild west of cowboyed sprocs that were in source control but a lot of times the sproc in the db didnt match the stored code. It became a way to skirt code reviews and push changes fast. Now, the environment was toxic to begin with, and maybe that wouldnt happen on a project with better technical leadership, but there is a lot of wiggle room for hanky panky at the db level

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#429

Post by icar » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

wolvesechoes wrote: post #394

cyberax wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, saying that calling Win32 APIs is not the most ergonomic approach to writing UIs would be an understatement, but if any software can be called stable, this is it.

I would compare win32 API to vanilla JS. Whatever framework you might want to use on top of win32 is what's comparable to the criticized web tech in the article.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#430

Post by ziml77 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

AlexMoffat wrote: post #42

The counterpoint is that if you don’t adopt a framework you end up with a “framework” you built yourselves that people outside your team don’t understand, is generally poorly documented and needs constant work to add features existing frameworks already have. There are common features needed on the FE and common problems to solve, why not at least start with something instead of nothing?

Yes this is a problem I've seen. It's impossible to find people who can be immediately productive because they've never seen your internal framework before. Even if it's extensively documented, it still takes time to learn and internalize. For long-term hires, it's not the worst, but if you ever temporarily need extra devs, you're SOL.