We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

The radium craze | Eric Bailey

The radioactive properties of React.

as days pass by — Hammer and nails

We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.

Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?

Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?

A fictitious, somewhat farcical conversation between me and the JavaScript programming language

It me.