Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's only if you've rehearsed it several times. Although now that I think about it, you will probably have to do it multiple times, so once you get good at it, that may be a reasonable estimate.
it was 10 minutes for me, too. No rehearsing. I don't know what you are going on about
The Frontend Treadmill
641–650 of 722 posts
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#642> 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,…
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#643> 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,…
I have heard of first-hand stories where people interviewed and been asked to have experience in THIS particular framework. Despite the fact that the person had years of FE experience, worked with a similar framework, they were, eventually, rejected most likely due to the fact that they did not have experience with THIS particular framework. So yeah, while I'm with you on the fundamentals, I'm also with you on the fa…
However, this is also a missed opportunity, in that those standards haven't stood still. That is, a lot of web developers are stuck in 2015 and still use Angular / React, Bootstrap or some other framework, LESS/SCSS. Meanwhile in CSS there's things like oklch colours, advanced variables and selectors, layers, etc - I only learned about them recently while working with another developer who has in fact kept up with them.
That is, I'd argue that companies, designers, etc are being kept behind by sticking to these frameworks, because they can only design for and build in what those frameworks support, instead of what is now possible.
Likewise, React Native or other crossplatform app building toolkits, instead of truly understanding the underlying operating system and tools. For a lot of these same companies, things like widgets, live activities, watch apps etc are infeasible because their frameworks don't support them (or in the case of widgets, the frameworks take up all the memory budget). But I believe that if you want a great app experience for your end users, you gotta have dedicated app developers and -designers.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#644> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. I am predominantly not a frontend dev, but when I do do frontend work, (and I don't avoid it by any means,) I have been using React for the past... 10 years now? And while some sentiment has been moving towards Svelte, by the time Svelte overtakes React, it will have been in production for just as long probably. And Angular might eventually run out of steam…
React today looks very different from React from 10 years ago. Easily as different as being a different framework. So, there is some nuance, but the logic isn't dead quite yet.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#645LLMs are a huge win in that regard. I delegate most of my frontend tasks to Claude Code, no need anymore to waste hours understanding why the latest version of framework xyz isn't compatible anymore with library abc. Also, it feels like there's way more boilerplate code, repetitive tasks in frontend land, once again my buddy Claude Code can generate UI components html and typescript code 100x faster that i can
My experience is very very different. LLM code is often useless for Frontend stuff for me while it's okay for things like Java and Rust etc. For frontend stuff the churn seems to be so big that I almost never get valid code because the LLM only know about some old versions or combinations of versions. The "statistical average" they learned is seldom correct for me. I wonder what we do differently.
He has some knowledge of the space and technical terminology from managing devs and projects, but was never a developer or engineer himself.
I watched his approach once and it's totally different from mine when I tried AI. He tells the AI what to do and if there's an error, he copy+pastes the error from the dev tools and says "fix this". And he'll keep cycling.
When this happens to me, I think too much about the error and perhaps I'm too specific to the AI on how to fix it. He just lets the AI do it over and over until it gets it right.
He doesn't care how the code looks, what libraries are used, etc.; the only thing that he cares about is "when I click this, does the right thing happen". It's actually kind of insane what he's built solo over a period of 4 months or so.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#646I 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 feel sad to hear that. I thought that the decrease in the VC-money flow would also slow down the number of new FE-related frameworks entering the mainstream, but it seems I was wrong then
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#647Earlier 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…
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#648Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure this is true . As I wrote elsewhere, almost everyone wants a web app or thinks that they have a web app, but usually it is just a dynamic website. You do not need to build up a framework to have a dynamic website.
"everyone" and "usually" are doing a lot of work here
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the craziest part is that it is built on top of JS/HTML which is an extremely stable technology at heart. 15 years ago I wrote a small (5KLOC) vanilla JS webapp that is still in daily use by around 10 people without a single line changed. It held up better then my Win32 applications! Almost all of the front end churn is simply a political/organizational failure.
I build simple applications for personal use like issue tracker, day planner, etc,. By default if you ask Claude it will generate React for frontend but I ask it to use HTML/CSS/JS instead. Because as a backend developer that makes sense to me. I find it hard to read the react code and want to avoid having dependency on npm. It's surprising how well the core technology works without fancy front end frameworks. Claude…
At first you can do this manually using selectors, but a complex app will need to be capable of doing this to hundreds of elements whenever state changes. At that point you will build some kind of abstraction because manually updating every element would be insanity. That abstraction might be a simple virtual DOM, and now you are halfway to building your own React.