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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#461

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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, I can go dig up some open source Objective-C/AppKit Mac app project that hasn’t seen any activity in 20 years and probably get it compiling and running in an evening. Cleaning out warnings might take a weekend.

I wonder what it’d take to achieve that kind of stability over time in the web front end world…

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#462

Post by koakuma-chan »

azemetre wrote: post #458
koakuma-chan wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know anyone who bought courses on react-router? The documentation is right there for free.

Wasn't react-training.com owned by the react-router people? I wonder what the training consultants recommended to use for routing...

And what's wrong with that? It works good if you're building an SPA in React.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#463

Post by koreth1 »

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…

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal.

Me either, but I have a hunch about why.

Are you a fast reader?

I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere close, I have to crank the playback speed up so high that I start having trouble understanding what the presenter is saying. That's on top of other things like poor searchability and no way to copy-paste code snippets.

The decline of reading skills, at least in the US, is pretty well-documented. And my hunch is that for the increasingly large number of people coming into the industry who don't read quickly or well, the efficiency of learning from videos is closer to parity with text. What's more, I suspect there's high correlation between lower reading skills and dislike of the act of reading, so videos are a way to avoid having to do something unpleasant.

I have no solid evidence to back any of this up, but it seems at least as plausible to me as any other explanations I've run across.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#464

Post by cosmic_cheese »

KronisLV wrote: post #331
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…

The other day, I needed to quickly whip up an internal dashboard with some dynamic logic. Being somewhat lazy, I just imported jQuery and some additional scripts for it, one of the small CSS-only libraries for basic styling, put all of the custom code in a single JS file and that's it. No toolchains. No build process. No learning about any particular way of doing state managing or rendering or what have you. Just som…

> No toolchains. No build process. No learning about any particular way of doing state managing or rendering or what have you. Just some files and some code.

To me this experience was once upon a time the single biggest selling point for the web as a development platform, and yet everyone is so eager to wade neck-deep into ever-changing library and build chain cruft instead. It’s mystifying.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#465

Post by koakuma-chan »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #408
uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. It bridges a purely server-rendered architecture with a SPA really nicely, and does it mostly with web standards. You don't need to run any client-side JS with a Remix app. It's not perfect, but there are a lot of benefits to its approach. I won't try to argue there's no front-end treadmill: there absolutely is, and I had to laugh reading the current top comment because I just had to migrate off Apollo CLI a…

> mostly with web standards IMO, the pain from "mostly" starts to show when integrating React Router v6 with legacy frameworks and applications. I'm sure if you go all in on React Router v6 it's great. At my $DAYJOB we are migrating to Remix w/ GraphQL Federation. It's been a pain. Especially because we haven't finished any of these migrations: * ExtJS -> JQuery * JQuery -> React class components * React class compon…

Remix already has data loading, why add GraphQL? It's a pain in the ass to work with from my brief experience.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#466

Post by FpUser »

I sometime hire web developers to do frontend for my clients. 90% of the time when I talk to them all I can hear is - can we use / rewrite with X/Y/Z/etc framework. Needless to say that I tell them to take a hike right away. I usually ask how would you implement this and that workflow using plain JS (using some specific libs is ok).

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#467

Post by apeescape »

viraptor wrote: post #409
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.

Prime is almost an anti-influencer. He promotes not adding dependencies more often than not. He's the guy making fun of the Ai craze, while also genuinely reviewing the recent releases and saying people should just learn to code instead. I really wouldn't put him in this general category of fe influencers discussed here.

His style is very much brain rot-like though. It's way more "entertainment" (though it isn't very entertaining to me) than informational content.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#468

Post by colordrops »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #325
colordrops wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in the market for 30 years, had some of the best jobs on earth doing FE, and only did my first React project last year. Maybe I'm an anomaly but I never felt that not knowing React has been a problem. "table stakes" is too strong a phrase.

To be fair, "30 years of experience" likely opens more doors than any particular skill listed on your CV - that doesn't reflect the way that a majority of junior/mid-level devs need to present their abilities, where pattern-matching is an unfortunate norm, particularly when there are orders of magnitude more applicants than open roles.

Everywhere I've worked would have judged heavy emphasis on framework expertise rather than fundamental CS concepts and web standards as a red flag. I don't think it's that rare.

Mentioning ability in React is obviously not a bad thing but some people make it their whole resume.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#469

Post by jrajav »

datagram wrote: post #387
nine_k wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain HTML and plain CSS (well, maybe with SASS) are pretty great. Plain JS loses much to plain Typescript though, to my mind.

It's not too difficult to use the TypeScript type checker on JS files, so it's possible to reap most of those benefits without having to introduce a compilation step.

In my experience, most of the benefits of Typescript come from type-checking across call boundaries, the point where type-related bugs are most likely to be introduced due to each side of the call often being in different locations and contexts. And you can't get those benefits without explicitly typing function parameters.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#470

Post by krainboltgreene »

ryan-duve wrote: post #432
krainboltgreene wrote: post #14

Giving up on that treadmill after investing 3 insanely intense years consuming everything about it was the best thing I ever did. Now I write elixir (phoenix liveview), sometimes I write javascript (phoenix hooks), sometimes that javascript uses Alpine. Zero pain. I have never felt more vindicated understanding HTTP, Hypermedia, and HATEOAS than I have in the last three years.

I've only used Elixir/Phoenix as the backend with Elm as the frontend. If you're familiar with that, can you TL;DR what Phoenix Liveview does differently than a Phoenix/Elm/GraphQL stack?

Yes. You get to drop the javascript compile and the graphql and you speak purely in three languages:

  1. elixir: def handle_event("save_customer", params, socket)...
  2. html: 
  3. And sometimes rarely javascript: this.pushEvent("reorder_customer_priorities")
That's it. No compiler, no type annotations, no graphql layer.
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