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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#551

Post by montag »

dpcx wrote: post #355
Illniyar wrote: post #313

I love it when people phrase this as a frontend problem. It's not a frontend problem. It's just a "it's a huge ecosystem with new players" problem. I've seen this in Java 15 years ago when it was the front of innovation (I can name dozens of frameworks, and a half dozen build systems coming out in as many years). React 17-18 is quite a minor change then perl 5->6 or python 2->3 For backend instead of "let's use this…

React has been around for 11 years. The amount of stuff that's online that tells you to do something with it one way when the react devs tell you to do it another is _astonishing_. And that's just from the last few years. Or take webpack that's been around for 13 years. The way things are set up even within the last few years have changed dramatically. If Apache configs moved as much as these systems did, no one woul…

imo, the Webpack situation is worse. React's evolution has been more incremental/cumulative. Best practices evolve, but not too much truly needs to be forgotten.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#552

Post by julik »

I wrote https://blog.julik.nl/2024/03/those-people-who-say-no in response to that Mastodon thread back when it was posted. I fully agree with the article. The problem, I believe, is that "getting off the treadmill" is incredibly hard if you have no authority to push for "getting off the treadmill", and when you get labeled as a problem when you suggest the "getting off the treadmill".

I do believe that with the end of ZIRP delivering more with smaller teams and being forced to make more pragmatic choices will be a net positive with this.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#553

Post by julik »

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…

It is incredibly pertinent. Even with the 20+ years of web dev I sometimes get swayed with clickbait like "If you are not using you are behind the curve, you are missing out, nobody works this way anymore, you are toast." This is an incredibly harmful take from those influencers. I do remember when it started - and it came from a good place, from a desire to "modernize from jQuery soup". But what it turned to now is noise that is sometimes hard to ignore.

It is only natural for a dev to ask themselves "am I still current? am I still relevant?". The induced FOMO triggers the worst bits of that anxiety, and sometimes I feel the influencers do not realise just how harmful this is.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#554

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

whstl wrote: post #337
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least when Vue 4 rolls around, you can pay Claude Code to do it for you (for a modest fee ). Btw what made you choose Vue over React?

Not GP but if I were to start a project today that needs an SPA I would go Vue rather than React 100%. Or if you want to be trendy, something like Solid or Svelte are also ok. React is okay-ish when done in moderation but it becomes spaghetti too quickly when the team is not made of 10x ninja rockstars from space. It is particularly bad for startups, you either slow down with code reviews or pay the price. The main r…

> The main reason IMO is the reactivity mode. Too many footguns to watch out for.

But Vue is reactive as well? Eg communication between components is not straightforward.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#555

Post by dguest »

Is the frontend treadmill responsible for making browsers so expensive to maintain?

Sorry for the incredibly naive question. I've only ever worked on "backend" projects. A few times I've made simple read-only pages in raw html (and maybe some CSS) to share information with colleagues. So while I get that the web is more awesome now than it was 10 years ago, I don't have any concrete understanding as to why this is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#556

Post by julik »

diggan wrote: post #86
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 in JS it seems like you can’t go more than six months without having to rewrite something. It’s bananas. The thing is, it's totally possible, but it requires restraint and properly caring about what you pull into your project. Back in the vanilla JS/jQuery days, when I got started, our "dependency management" was basically copy-paste .js files into a `vendor/` directory. Then nodejs/npm appeared (and bowe…

At this point in time this is absolutely a "people and process" problem. But also the process that is there has been excercised and is known to folks you may hire. Trying to come up with less of it (or with a different version of it) dramatically shrinks the number of people who can be productive on your product from day 1, and is not a choice to be made lightly. There is also a number of people who will then be spending time convincing you that the "none" or "less" process you have imposed is wrong and you should "just get on with the program".

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#557

Post by jwhiles »

bloomingkales wrote: post #215
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…

Here's one: https://remix.run/ These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :( And they just promote it and promote it: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix https://kentcdodds.com/courses Pure grift. But since most peo…

In case anyone isn't familiar with remix, bloomingkales seemingly has no familiarity with the framework. Obviously it's not been created as a conspiracy to sell training courses. The idea is ludicrous.

It's quite a nice framework. It's easy to learn, straightforward, the people in their discord are very helpful. It has the backing of a large company (shopify) who are using it extensively.

It is, I'll say again, obviously not a conspiracy to sell training courses.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#558

Post by hsuduebc2 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #537
Swizec wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: you can listen to audio while commuting or driving or cleaning or working out. I love audio for higher level things and to get an overview of the topic. Then text to dive into the details.

Another big driver to move from text to video: It is easier to monetise video via YouTube compared to a blog. People with millions of subscriptions on YouTube aren't creating FE learning material out of the goodness of their hearts; it is a big business. Also, video is almost always lower information density compared to text, so it is easier for your net to capture more customers.

And you can't just search in it. It's truly trashy format for anything other that presentation or lecture. For simple information sharing it's horrible.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#559

Post by hsuduebc2 »

It’s kind of wild that local storage is still the go-to in most places. Just a single big string, and the only way to handle complex data is by endlessly serializing and parsing one massive JSON object.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#560

Post by saos »

> People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away

This hit hard.

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