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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#541

Post by bloomingkales »

nophunphil wrote: post #517
tshaddox wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're mistaken. I can't comment on the quality of Kent C. Dodds' educational content, but his formal affiliation with Remix was short-lived. The courses that he sells have no apparent affiliation with Remix (the open source project or the company). Incidentally, Remix is an open source project started by the React Router devs to create more framework features around React Router. React Router is probably one…

> React Router is probably one of the most widely deployed JavaScript libraries ever and is the furthest thing imaginable from a project created by grifters to sell online courses. This is a funny example (to me) because in 2017, one of the two co-creators of React Router (Michael) came to my job and gave a two or three-day in-person training course on React. I think he also covered Redux and React Router. We had a g…

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#542

Post by [deleted] »

HankStallone wrote: post #252
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.

The best programming videos I've seen are ones where someone just pointed a camera at a teacher in a classroom setting, like the Programming Paradigms series Jerry Cain did at Stanford some years ago. No attempt to add entertainment value, just a teacher, students, and chalkboards. I wish I could find more content like that, especially about newer stuff.

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#543

Post by ForTheKidz »

localghost3000 wrote: post #148

> And if you’re an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies Been working in FE for nearly 20 years and lived through several major paradigm shifts. I think I am qualified to have an opinion here: I definitely think that you will be a more well-rounded engineer if you know all the core web tech. So strongly agree there. I am skeptical,…

> The fact is that if you want to maximize your "market value", you still need to be _very_ good at React.

In some sense yes, but full-stack engineers are nowhere near the top of "market value". Frontend has a pretty hard ceiling on compensation. Past a certain level of advancement you'll never need to build a UI again.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#544

Post by thisisabore »

koreth1 wrote: post #463
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…

> 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 c…

I really think you have got a point, I'd add however that reading is more cognitive effort than watching a video, at a basic level (that is, information in the text or video put aside).

Just see how hard it is to read more than a few paragraphs when tired before bed vs. how hard it is to watch something in the same state.

I think this gets added to the point you are making about reading skills declining.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#545

Post by jakub_g »

colordrops wrote: post #468
CognitiveLens wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Counterargument: my colleague with 15y exp (10 C++ & 5 Angular/Vue) has been unemployed for 2yrs already because he has no React on the CV and no local company wants to hire him (secondary size tech hub in the country, EU). He's probably have to force-relocate soon.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#546

Post by globular-toast »

ncpop wrote: post #540

Probably a little more than 10 years ago I made a project with Django and Angular 1.x. I had a look at it again recently and managed to update Django to v5 with very little effort. The front-end however would obviously need to be completely rewritten.

AngularJS hasn't just disappeared. There are security issues that are now unpatched, but what's the risk here? Users attack software running on their own computer?

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#547

Post by wiseowise »

nine_k wrote: post #271
wiseowise wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere That’s because those “people” are either larping students or kids that want to become programmers. I have never in my 10 year career met a person who said “yeah, I learn my craft from Fireship videos”.

Likely these videos did not exist when your reference / age group was acquiring these skills. Videos are sort of easier to produce (via screen capture), and are much easier to show the effect of FE things: look, we write code like this, now we can click here, and the page reacts that way. No need to muck with JSFiddle or something. I'm not a fan of videos as a reference medium, but they can be elucidating to those wh…

Blender is a gui first program, it makes sense that videos will work for it.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#548

Post by torginus »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
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…

> 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 think it used to be much worse. While the youtube/Tiktok churn might be much more active than 5 years ago, back in the ancient era of 2018-2016, the churn was driven by the fact that tooling sucked, which was capitalized on by people who were very good at self promotion but a lot less good at engineering.

I'm not a 'frontend guy', but I do write frontend code. I use Typescript React with hooks and context most of the time, rollup with esbuild to bundle and to run my dev workflows and raw CSS/SCSS for styling or Bootstrap for cookie-cutter UIs. I've also dabbled with Svelte.

This stack has served me well, and nothing here is newer than 5 years old. There's a cadre of much newer technology that I would consider stable (Vite + SvelteKit), but since new projects come with a maturity curve from the framework side and a learning curve, learning to troubleshoot issues and solve problems.

Anyone who constantly hops frameworks is doomed to be a perpetual amateur, working with buggy frameworks they know nothing about, and they will leave a trail of projects using deprecated frameworks in their wake.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#549

Post by wiseowise »

golergka wrote: post #288
wiseowise wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere That’s because those “people” are either larping students or kids that want to become programmers. I have never in my 10 year career met a person who said “yeah, I learn my craft from Fireship videos”.

I've learned most of what I know about database internals from MCU lecture course on YouTube. It's great.

Famous YouTube influencer checks notes Carnegie Mellon university.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#550

Post by hyperbolablabla »

As a frontend engineer, I see the proclivity frontend engineers have for fully rewriting their codebase in a new framework for literally no reason all the time. It drives me absolutely bananas. This would never happen in game dev.
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