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Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

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Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#51

Post by wackget »

anakaine wrote: post #37
wackget wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done web development since the 90s and I can tell you authoritatively that most of what people talk about, like those frontend frameworks, are gibberish. Or at least, they're not worth the hype they're given. The wheel is constantly turning, and the hot new framework of today is just a re-hash of something already done years ago with a pretty facade. You probably learned the actual fundamentals of the web, whi…

I last successfully did front end dev in the late 90s ans veryearly 00s. I'm very back end these days. Front end work feels incredibly frustrating, between things like UI/UX design, responsive layouts, async, handling data into whatever thing it is you're trying to populate, etc. The whole lot is a massive nightmare to even try getting back in to. It's frustrating to the point t where I look at back and end know that…

Honestly it's only frustrating if you approach it with an "all or nothing" mindset. Your site doesn't have to be all-singing, all-dancing. In fact it's probably better off being simple. To wit, you don't need async/AJAX stuff (unless you're making a chat app or something).

You definitely don't need a framework and you might actually be able to avoid using JavaScript altogether. I use jQuery only because I like the elegant/terse syntax and I struggle to think of any type of "ordinary" website where you'd need anything else.

If you approach frontend like "I need to use React/Angular" then yeah, you're gonna bash your head against a wall, because it's an entire new ecosystem and paradigm to learn.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#52

Post by meiraleal »

wackget wrote: post #22
TillE wrote: post #15

I haven't done web development since the late 90s, so quite a lot of what people talk about (from frontend frameworks to Kubernetes) is total gibberish to me. That's fine, it's not something I'm interested in even as a hobby.

I have done web development since the 90s and I can tell you authoritatively that most of what people talk about, like those frontend frameworks, are gibberish. Or at least, they're not worth the hype they're given. The wheel is constantly turning, and the hot new framework of today is just a re-hash of something already done years ago with a pretty facade. You probably learned the actual fundamentals of the web, whi…

Running LLMs in the browser and creating AI-enhanced experiences is where is the innovation in the frontend lies now. UI frameworks is a matter of taste, there is simple, complex and bloated/corporate alternatives.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#54

Post by bufferoverflow »

Pomfers wrote: post #48

No one understands everything here. When it comes to software development, everyone I know says they're only really knowledgeable about what they work on. Most other areas, they'll have at best some passing knowledge of. It's like how doctors become specialists in just one part of the human body. There's maybe 5 people in the world are are a qualified dermatologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, and cardiologist at t…

That's not true. I understand most of things posted and discussed here. And I'm not some amazing 100X programmer. Having a CS degree definitely helps.

However HN is definitely skewed towards the obscure and the nostalgic with a dash of genetics and cosmology. Most of the programming happens in traditional languages - C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/PHP/Python, and HN would make you believe everyone is writing functional stuff with monads and functors in LISP or Erlang.

The community is great though, very knowledgeable.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#55

Post by giantg2 »

I understand many of the things on the surface or conceptual level. But I can't transfer any of it into success. I think I'd rather be dumb and successful than "smart" (my managers' words) and shitty at my job.

Also, even the things I do have some understanding of rarely come up in my software job. So it's not like you need to know everything. Seems like it's better to know less as long as you know just the right things.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#56

Post by projektfu »

There's a lot that a hobbyist might find interesting from a technical standpoint that has no real relevance to their life. For example, you could learn Kubernetes as a hobby, and mess around with container orchestration, but why? What do you hope to get out of it? You could try to do a deep dive into enterprise architecture. But again, for what purpose? Hobbyists might want to make something functional, or beautiful, or solve problems, or just know they can do it. But they usually don't want to go around solving big-corp problems for free.

If you're wondering about content like Rust or Haskell programming, the jargon and implied knowledge can be a little intimidating. A lot of early Rust users were coming from advanced modern C++ and/or functional programming (FP) and use those concepts freely without assuming people might yet need to learn them. A lot of Haskell people have learned ways of thinking from other Haskell people or other FP people and they don't feel the need to explain what they're doing all the time. But it is intimidating. However, it can also be fun.

I'm the worst kind of hobbyist. I almost never create anything anymore. When I do, I usually don't use the cool stuff, just some Python, shell, or Awk. But my hobby is learning about this stuff, what people are doing, and trying to figure out how people are thinking in different ways. So I have done a bit of functional programming and read a lot of code. I find it fascinating. But nothing I have made in that area is worth looking at.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#57

Post by anakaine »

wackget wrote: post #51
anakaine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I last successfully did front end dev in the late 90s ans veryearly 00s. I'm very back end these days. Front end work feels incredibly frustrating, between things like UI/UX design, responsive layouts, async, handling data into whatever thing it is you're trying to populate, etc. The whole lot is a massive nightmare to even try getting back in to. It's frustrating to the point t where I look at back and end know that…

Honestly it's only frustrating if you approach it with an "all or nothing" mindset. Your site doesn't have to be all-singing, all-dancing. In fact it's probably better off being simple. To wit, you don't need async/AJAX stuff (unless you're making a chat app or something). You definitely don't need a framework and you might actually be able to avoid using JavaScript altogether. I use jQuery only because I like the el…

I would like to have something that looks nice and modern, has a good user experience, and is responsive. Those three requirements take me pretty close to the "too ahrd" rabbit hole most of the time. Not always, just often enough.

Re: Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

#58

Post by jnaina »

Some (most?) of the folks who hang out here have been exposed to these type of contents for decades. For example, I started out reading Byte, Creative Computing, Dr Dobb's Journal, Compute!, old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, etc among others, voraciously when I was a teen.

With the demise of the dead tree medium, I and my fellow geek brethren found HN as an alternative, to find crowd sourced and curated articles of interest.

Give it some time. It will all start making sense.

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