The problem I’ve regularly encountered in my work is that I don’t get to do my job the way I think is best for both me and my employer or client. The employer, who isn’t the web development expert, almost always has a clear idea of what real web development is supposed to look like: Single-Page-Apps and React (or React-like frameworks).
An intimation that it wouldn’t be the right solution for this particular problem is taken as an admission of incompetence.
I’ve experienced this. And I think this observation is even more true when it comes to recruitment.
React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.
Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.
Debating complexity is pointless because it’s a subjective metric. Every developer has a different gut feeling about simplicity, complexity and the appropriate amount of complexity for a given task. When people try to find an objective definition, they come to wildly different results. And that’s okay.
Instead, we should focus on hard metrics from a user perspective. Performance, efficiency, compatibility, accessibility and fault-tolerance can be measured, tested and evaluated, automatically and manually.
Any amount of complexity is fine as long as these goals are met.
The goal isn’t to write less code.
It’s to ship less code to users. Better code. Faster code. More resilient code.
THIS!
Sooooo many front-end developers don’t grasp this fundamental principle: it’s not about you!
Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
Don’t replace. Augment.
Inside me there are two wolves. They’re both JavaScript.
I’m trying to understand why developers would trust third-party code more than a native browser feature.
Two JavaScript frameworks—Svelte and Astro—share a philosophy, but take subtly different approaches.
Trying to understand why people think they need to make single page apps.