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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#701

Post by gr4vityWall »

gr4vityWall wrote: post #581

Doesn't seem to be a popular opinion here, but I think FE can be ok. A typical React application feels easier to reason about than HTMX-based code that I looked at. I never had a hard time picking up an app that used React/Preact + Tailwind + some simple state management library like Preact Signals. Maybe never having had to deal with GraphQL or Server Components helped. Tooling, OTOH, does feel like it gets insane f…

I also want to add: the new hooks introduced by React 19 seem like a complexity creep. But I haven't found any need to use them yet.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#702

Post by nop_slide »

pier25 wrote: post #524
dmix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%, Turbo and stimulus will save projects from React/Vue hell for 95% of cases. The other 5% you can make isolated fancy JS stuff without it eating the entire frontend.

Or maybe HTMX

Hotwire is basically a higher level HTMX

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#703

Post by localghost3000 »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #543
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.

I was speaking specifically about FE devs.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#704

Post by synergy20 »

intrasight wrote: post #378
synergy20 wrote: post #143

Frontend has always been a pain for me. Just switched from React to Vue since it's getting harder to stay with React. then I was thinking maybe just the old bootstrap(alpine.js,htmx) with SSR approach? it's simpler and more importantly, can be maintained a few years down the road without a revamp(due to frontend breaking changes). In the end, I still stick to Vue.js, as the SSR approach has its own problems, nothing…

Also for the money you save by not having a dozen software engineers to maintain the frontend and its dependencies, you can hire a very talented front end designer and give everyone on the engineering team a 100% raise.

you mean no SPA just the old fashion frontend? vue.js still needs developers but simpler than react for sure, less money needed with vuejs down the road

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#705

Post by miragecraft »

Use “survivor” frameworks, things that last a decade will likely last another. Tailwind, React, Vue, PHP/Laravel, Rails etc. are all very much alive and kicking.

Plus there is nothing wrong with using outdated front end framework other than being unfashionable.

The web is the most backwards compatible platform ever invented,

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#706

Post by figassis »

the_other wrote: post #91
figassis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a BE engineer when that happened, I had just started to become proficient in it, coming from Angular. I threw in the towel and went back to my backend world of peace and happiness. So he's not alone, these deprecations are insane.

Front-end dev here. I hear from the b/e people about containers, serverless, lambdas, ORMs, queues, schedulers, caches, pipelines (ok, I use these too), databases, API gateways. Oh, but it's podman now, not Docker. And they're moving everything off AWS to Azure. And there's three versions of the API my f/e needs to talk to still in production. And every micro-service depends on a different version of Node. Apart from…

The beauty of this is that these technologies all tend to be optional, backwards compatible, and interchangeable. You make your choices when architecting depending on what you want to solve. You can build Hussain Bolt or Frankenstein. On the FE, just the landing page is a mission.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#707

Post by sickblastoise »

jilles wrote: post #305
jchw wrote: post #145

> 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…

I've been doing React for about 10 years. Just started playing with Svelte 5 a few days ago. It's so simple to work with. Built a simple stock allocation app and what surprised me most was the bundle size... 9kb (gzip). That's better than any other framework I am aware of. That's even smaller than htmx which is somewhat "anti-js"

I think svelte 5 is an actual innovation, it does not behave or feel like a “framework” to me. It feels like a natural extension of building an front end with raw html, css, js, solving the headaches you eventually hit when you do so.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#708

Post by bborud »

I wonder why nobody seems to have designed a front end framework by sitting down and asking themselves how to express things clearly. Every single front end framework seems to have been designed by people just riffing on all the nonsense complexity already in the world. Odd syntax rules, lots of implicit behaviors and side effects, logic spread across at least 5 different domains etc.

Why hasn’t anyone talented designed a front end framework?

And before getting angry and downvoting me for this heresy: prove me wrong first.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#709

Post by mangodrunk »

gedy wrote: post #152
mangodrunk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. The BE / FE split has been a really bad experiment. It has exasperated the issue where the FE is overly complex because there are people on a FE team, so they toil away and just add complexity. It is also problematic that we have so many people who only know web development and nothing else.

> The BE / FE split has been a really bad experiment. What do you mean - "full stack" is very popular and frankly produces some of this weird unmaintainable code. Hiring backend-y type people and making them develop UI (with state especially) is where half these companies realize "crap we need a front end developer"..

I’m sure you can find horrible code bases in any arrangement. I will say that a good team will tend to be better for more projects than two good teams (fe/be). There certainly are cases where a split will make sense and be much better, but I have seen it become the default when one team should be.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#710

Post by ayewo »

josephg wrote: post #694
wyclif wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no doubt the Primeagen has a popular channel (459K subs at last count), but his videos are super annoying to me. Many of them are just him reading a blog post and adding some light clowning to it. To me it feels like a waste of time...I can just read the article myself a lot faster and the clowning doesn't add any value to me.

I feel the same way. I don’t think you and I are the target audience for him. My read is that his content is actually pitched to a very junior audience - or an audience who don’t really want to read or engage with the blog post themselves. They want to feel smart and entertained without doing any actual thinking. That sounds like I’m a snob - but I really get it. I’ve been watching Inkmaster lately with my gf - which…

> But I wouldn’t call it educational.

Edutainment perhaps?

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