The Frontend Treadmill

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 1:06 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #418

thaumasiotes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a lot of younger developers only ever really learned React and are stuck the IE6 era it was designed around Last release of IE6: 2008 Concerted campaign to make everybody stop using IE6: 2009 Microsoft joins that campaign: 2011 First release of React: 2013

It may be hard to remember now that we’ve had frequently-updated browsers for so long but not everyone updated promptly. That lead to a lot of now-vestigial frontend culture where developers would build around the oldest browser they couldn’t afford not to support. That colored a lot of low-level decisions about how events were implemented, false claims about virtual DOMs being fast or efficient, and especially the c…

Post by josephg » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 1:10 AM UTC

GitPushOrigin wrote: post #297

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 1:27 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #475

bloomingkales wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No personal vendetta. We sit here and punch the mysterious air as to why things are the way they are. I thought maybe we'd punch up at something that is plausibly a culprit. I'll admit it may be punching down, since this is just one dude. But then again, it's one dude who influenced a lot of people ... We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being 1) New 2) Dumb 3) FOMO 4) Dumb 5) Unqualified You u…

> We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being New / Dumb … Well, as a cohort, I think the ratio of inept programmers to skilled programmers stays mostly constant regardless of stuff like this. Like, if programming is hard to learn, fewer people will try and learn it. But also the skill bar goes up - so people spend more time as inept developers before they’re skilled. Likewise if programming gets…

Post by areoform » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 1:32 AM UTC

poncho_romero wrote: post #282

yawnxyz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

MDN has exactly those kinds of tutorials and walk throughs! It’s not all API documentation

Post by DidYaWipe » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 1:48 AM UTC

fourneau wrote: post #238

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…

I've been working on a small side project on-and-off for the last year and some. The state-of-the-art decisions I made last year are already dead. There's a new version of everything, and everything was a breaking change, nothing is backwards compatible. How do people live like this?