Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#61

Post by magicbuzz » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

have_faith wrote: post #3

danesparza wrote: post #2

I'm always fascinated by these -- it puts hard earned skills (that I would otherwise take for granted) in perspective. Thanks! A few suggestions: I would argue that Redux isn't required (but suggested), and instead a Flux implementation is required. I would also argue that SASS (or LESS) preprocessor experience isn't required but also just suggested.

I've been using plain css for my React stuff so far but I do miss a lot of the syntactic sugar Sass allows, like nested selectors, BEM extrapolation, colour utilities etc. What is the norm for people these days when it comes to CSS and React? is css-in-js very popular at all?

Everyone quotes “the standard” as what they do. CSS is probably the one area where there is no consistency in how it is handled in React.

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#62

Post by fastball » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #60

Crazy to me how far we’ve come from HTML and some script tags. Part of me is really sad that the web is big and complicated and ugly now. I just don’t have the patience to read some new framework author’s long winded and grandiose tutorial and ode to themselves. Why is it so hard to do seemingly simple things? I can remember 10 years ago training up someone with no programming experience at all to competency in a few…

Are you implying that the websites being built in 2008 were as sophisticated and complex as the sites in 2018?

Have you considered technologies like React Native which mean you don't need to maintain 4 different entirely separate codebases for your 4 different frontends?

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#63

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

I understand this is opinionated and "personal", but on the off chance that this might make React less intimidating, let me chime in and say that you can do professional work (and build pretty much any reasonable application) without:

- really understanding "semantic HTML" (if you know what div's and span's are, you're ready to get to work),

- understanding flexbox (you can, and many pro developers do, just use a CSS framework, and they're especially nice in React because they're delivered as components, so all you really need is the documentation for the layout components of the framework you pick),

- design patterns --- in fact, I might argue that you're better off not reading about design patterns, which are kind of an architectural blind alley,

- CSS preprocessors, which are neat but inessential,

- CSS architecture,

- Redux --- more nascent React developers have been derailed by the suggestion that they need to grok Redux than by anything else in the ecosystem; you don't even need to know what Redux is to build perfectly good React applications,

- async actions, which are another aspect of Flux, which again you don't need to grok,

- react-router, which is a disaster of an API that abstracts something you can build in just a hundred lines of code or so, and can in fact do without altogether,

- lodash and moment (this is nitpicking, since neither of these demand more than a couple of minutes to pick up, but just to be clear: you don't need them, especially in ES6).

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#64

Post by cryptozeus » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

I like the way this is structured. I get it.

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#65

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #60

Crazy to me how far we’ve come from HTML and some script tags. Part of me is really sad that the web is big and complicated and ugly now. I just don’t have the patience to read some new framework author’s long winded and grandiose tutorial and ode to themselves. Why is it so hard to do seemingly simple things? I can remember 10 years ago training up someone with no programming experience at all to competency in a few…

Modern programming languages are a lot more featureful and sophisticated than assembly language, and they change a lot more than instruction set architectures do. How is your lament different than that of an assembly language programmer, who might complain "crazy how far we've come from conditional jumps and some stack manipulation"?

I'm 41 and got started in the 1990s, and those assembly advocates really did exist. What makes you think that 20 years from now people won't have a hard time believing that anyone could have advocated "just HTML and some script tags" over modern development practices?

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#66

Post by stickfigure » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #26

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #12

I've noticed this spirit of "learn everything" all over the React and JavaScript community, and I don't think it's a good thing. Learning happens contextually as you figure things out. I see no use to learning half of the things on here that you'll never use. You do risk, however, in the confusing and complex JavaScript landscape, getting paralyzed by choice and never getting off the ground. I shutter thinking about…

As one grows old we learn to avoid learning every new fad until dust settles. I saved a few brain cells by not bothering with GWT, CoffeeScript, mootools, YUI, prototype...

That's silly.

GWT was a solid platform for quite a large number of years, and is still used in quite a large number of enterprises. Also, there are a lot of good ideas in there that the JS community is only just catching up to, like dead code elimination.

A lot of modern javascript/typescript syntax is inspired by CoffeeScript. And CS is so trivially easy to learn that "saved a few brain cells" sounds like intellectual laziness.

There's a fair argument to be made for not jumping on the bleeding edge. But your examples are all mature technologies that had good solid lifespans during which people used them to build successful products. If those are fads to you, I'm guessing you must still do most of your work in C?

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#67

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

amalag wrote: post #49

cutler wrote: post #38

I'll take Rails + turbolinks over this tangled mess any day.

Absolutely. There are so few places where you actually need an SPA. And now with form_with doing remote forms by default and getting inline responses from the server it is a real stretch for someone to say they absolutely need some of these JS frameworks to get some simple non page load functionality.

There's something to this complaint, in that I actually rarely want an SPA either --- I usually want something that behaves like a damn web page.

But having had several years of experience building web applications in Rails, handing data carefully between templates and controller code and managing the leaky abstractions for those places I actually had to use Javascript, I do not miss that experience at all. I'm not a front-end developer (I do it when I have to) and I am 3-5X more productive in React than I ever was at Rails front-end. If that's the return a nonspecialist gets from the React stack, I can only assume someone who specializes in it does even better.

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#68

Post by tmpz22 » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #63

I understand this is opinionated and "personal", but on the off chance that this might make React less intimidating, let me chime in and say that you can do professional work (and build pretty much any reasonable application) without: - really understanding "semantic HTML" (if you know what div's and span's are, you're ready to get to work), - understanding flexbox (you can, and many pro developers do, just use a CSS…

That's really stretching the definition of "professional work". If you're just gluing third party components and libraries together you're going to end up with a bloated mess.

This is why javascript/front-end developers get so much flak - there is a prevailing opinion that you can just fake it and not bother to learn best practices, not bother to test, and not bother to care about performance. If you do not consistently produce work of professional quality you just might not be a professional.

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#69

Post by enraged_camel » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #63

I understand this is opinionated and "personal", but on the off chance that this might make React less intimidating, let me chime in and say that you can do professional work (and build pretty much any reasonable application) without: - really understanding "semantic HTML" (if you know what div's and span's are, you're ready to get to work), - understanding flexbox (you can, and many pro developers do, just use a CSS…

I agree fully. I think a lot of people who claim that someone needs to know those things to be employable are just elitist. It’s no different those who claim one needs a Ph. D. in math/statistics to grok machine learning.

I’ve found that the best way to learn is top-down: identify the problem and then start learning the bits and pieces you need to solve it and go as deep as necessary (but no more).

Re: Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018

#70

Post by wesleytodd » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

I am a professional developer who primarily uses React and I actively avoid most of this. I keep up with the community so know (or at least know about) almost all of this, but choose not to use it all.

The direction I have seen react go is exactly the opposite of the reason I liked it in the first place. It was simple and JUST A VIEW LAYER. How it became all of this is just typical software devs over complicating things for themselves IMO.