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I'm a web dev, been doing this 11 years. But i totally feel past it, granted i code less and less nowadays so i havent kept up with new technologies. I've hire

I'm a web dev, been doing this 11 years. But i totally feel past it, granted i code less and less nowadays so i havent kept up with new technologies. I've hired people that are much better at web dev than me and let them accomplish a task with pretty much whatever tech they want to use, because i believe you shouldn't constrict a developer if you dont have to. Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours for me to create in basic jQuery, bootstrap and simple PHP/MySQL, the tendency is to pull in Angular, Laravel, gulp or grunt, composer dependencies and a whole host of code for doing something really simple. It ends up becoming a frigging nightmare to maintain and deploy, i just want to do a git pull and thats it deployed, but instead i've gotta do artisan commands, migrations, grunt commands etc etc etc. Anyway, i tell myself that what their doing is a better way of doing things and i'm just someone with outdated knowledge, because when i do it, i use basic tech and accomplish the same task in less time and with WAAAY less lines of code. While its maybe not the best practices, its simple. I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :(

raverbashing 10y ago
> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( Well, in some ways yes. But experience has a value Today people use an Arduino to flash a led, "in my time" it could be done with 2 transistors (you can do it with one + one "funny" component I guess - like a transformer)
- pjc50 10y ago
  The point of flashing an LED with an Arduino is not to flash the LED, it's to get the tools setup and workflow working while learning the basics. It's the "hello world" of microcontroller programming. I've heard this process called "flow flushing". With things like FPGAs it can take days to go from nothing to flashing an LED. Because the toolchain is large, complicated and opaque. It sounds like the Javascript world have built large toolchains for large projects and have then cargo-culted into using the same toolchains for tiny projects when they don't have to.
  - pm215 10y ago
    "Pipecleaning" is another term I've heard for that "get the tool workflow sorted" step, I think.
hesarenu 10y ago
i am have programming in js for decade, these days i go with react unless the item requires few lines then its jquery.
mehwoot 10y ago
Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours If your entire job is doing small apps that take a week of work, these tools are not much better than the previous generation (personally I'd use Rails but that's just one generation on from PHP/MySQL). Especially when you add in the cost of non uniformity if you let everyone choose their own slightly different flavour of the innumerable javascript tools available. But as part of a team that has migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React in the last year, whilst I was skeptical at first, React has been an absolute godsend. Everything we build now is so much more modular and much closer to how non tech people view our website (and so how they ask for features), which makes it easier to develop. React isn't designed to help "I need to build this 20 hour website quicker". I think the problem is mostly cargo culting. Smart and outspoken developers use these tools, but they're also the ones dealing with complex problems at their jobs, not everybody needs to solve the problems they are solving. And "Honestly Rails is good enough for this app" doesn't make for a very sexy meetup presentation.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm confused: what do you mean by "migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React"? What are you using as your backend?
  - problems 10y ago
    Just one of the many ways that modern Javascript baffles me - people pretend the client and server are equivalent.
    - atoko 10y ago
      You can still render placeholders from the server and fill these in with React
    - mehwoot 10y ago
      The more technical details you include the more people pick up and discuss minute technical details instead of the point of what I was trying to say, which is that my experience with a large codebase was these modern javascript tools have solved a lot of problems we had. If you want all the gory details here they are: it was a Rails 3 app using Postgres and Elasticsearch that we migrated to React + node.js + webpack + babel, elastic search as the data store and using Keystone.js for backend data manipulation (which uses mongodb). Rails was indexing its data in Elasticsearch already so we could start serving data through node.js immediately without having to migrate all the data backend, which is being slowly moved to keystone.js.
jbrauer 10y ago
> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( I've only been at it for about 2-3 years, and I must say, I feel this exact same way. Started on the LAMP stack in school and now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" and outdated since MEAN and all of the encompassing JS libraries have become popular. I caved and started to dabble in MEAN (even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long shot yet..) and must say it is the most fun I have had while coding and setting up projects ever, however I can't help but feel it is like you say, "a frigging nightmare to maintain and deploy". Nothing seems intuitive...
- talmand 10y ago
  >> now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" You want to know what's "uncool" around here for me? Wanting to markup a table with table elements, mostly for the accessibility benefits. I've never seen such an odd pushback. Tables are so "old" I'm told.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Actually, what people frown upon is using tables for layout. Using them to display actual tabular data is quite fine. (I mean, everything is fine at the end of the day as long as the end-user is happy, but you know what I mean...)
    - talmand 10y ago
      No, you don't understand. I don't want to use tables for layout, I want to use tables to display a good old-fashioned table. A table displayed in an otherwise normally marked up page. That is what's getting the pushback. I guess I could say I want to use table elements to layout a table, which would trigger the "don't use tables for layout" argument.
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        So... ignore them? If you want to use a table for tabular data, then please - use a table! If someone whines you've used a table, then ignore their whining and keep using table markup for tabular data.
groovy2shoes 10y ago
> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( You’re doing it wrong. You’re not the one who should feel bad, they are the ones who should feel bad! You’re in the right. Try doing what I do: wave your cane around and shout at them to get off your lawn. Be sure to really drive it home by telling them the same two or three stories over and over again, about how things were back in “your day”[0] :) In all seriousness, I sympathized with every thing you said until that very last sentence. For whatever reason, I never feel bad —— I just “know” that my way is the better way, and that their ways are just fashionable fads and will pass. If I turn out to be wrong and any of those things happens to wind up sticking, well... I’ll cross that bridge when I get there ;) -- [0]: E.g., how much more vivid color was, how much brighter the day was, how much tastier the food was, how it was the Golden Age of Television, Film, Literature, Music, Journalism, and Politics, how men were men and you could tell them from boys by whether or not they had correctly implemented call-by-name argument-passing semantics in their Algol-60 compilers, and how everything was just generally better. “What’s that? Your Web page is 32MB minified and gzipped? Back in my day, we only had 32MB of RAM total, if we were lucky, and we could still listen to mp3s and browse the Web and send snarky messages instantly to one another even then. Sure, our displays were tiny, low-resolution CRTs, and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!!” /me listlessly stares 1000 yards past his junior developers...
- sunshiney 10y ago
  sits here stunned at how perfectly you described my young adult days....
ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
'gulp or grunt' are these actual JavaScript libraries/frameworks? Or are you referring to human bodily noises?
ofcapl_ 10y ago
I'm soo 100% like You. I've found my own stack of choice - requirejs+jade(pug)+npm scripts(to parse requirejs and ES6 with babel) just do my job - no matter if it is a front-end or mobile one. I've also add to it Express.js if want to build something full-stack - no front-end frameworks, just jade(pug) and own way of files organization etc. Sometimes I have worse day and think that I'm behind new hyped stuff but then I realise that my way just works without any fancy setup..
- ofcapl_ 10y ago
  in addition, I've took a look on react/ember/angular etc. but it just doesn't fit me - but at the same time I've took some principles from every of them and use it in my projects (e.g. code modularity)
clifanatic 10y ago
> the tendency is to pull in Angular, Laravel, gulp or grunt, composer dependencies and a whole host of code for doing something really simple. First experience with Resume Driven Development?

raverbashing 10y ago

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( Well, in some ways yes. But experience has a value Today people use an Arduino to flash a led, "in my time" it could be done with 2 transistors (you can do it with one + one "funny" component I guess - like a transformer)

pjc50 10y ago
The point of flashing an LED with an Arduino is not to flash the LED, it's to get the tools setup and workflow working while learning the basics. It's the "hello world" of microcontroller programming. I've heard this process called "flow flushing". With things like FPGAs it can take days to go from nothing to flashing an LED. Because the toolchain is large, complicated and opaque. It sounds like the Javascript world have built large toolchains for large projects and have then cargo-culted into using the same toolchains for tiny projects when they don't have to.
- pm215 10y ago
  "Pipecleaning" is another term I've heard for that "get the tool workflow sorted" step, I think.

hesarenu 10y ago

i am have programming in js for decade, these days i go with react unless the item requires few lines then its jquery.

mehwoot 10y ago

Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours If your entire job is doing small apps that take a week of work, these tools are not much better than the previous generation (personally I'd use Rails but that's just one generation on from PHP/MySQL). Especially when you add in the cost of non uniformity if you let everyone choose their own slightly different flavour of the innumerable javascript tools available. But as part of a team that has migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React in the last year, whilst I was skeptical at first, React has been an absolute godsend. Everything we build now is so much more modular and much closer to how non tech people view our website (and so how they ask for features), which makes it easier to develop. React isn't designed to help "I need to build this 20 hour website quicker". I think the problem is mostly cargo culting. Smart and outspoken developers use these tools, but they're also the ones dealing with complex problems at their jobs, not everybody needs to solve the problems they are solving. And "Honestly Rails is good enough for this app" doesn't make for a very sexy meetup presentation.

enraged_camel 10y ago
Sorry, I'm confused: what do you mean by "migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React"? What are you using as your backend?
- problems 10y ago
  Just one of the many ways that modern Javascript baffles me - people pretend the client and server are equivalent.
  - atoko 10y ago
    You can still render placeholders from the server and fill these in with React
  - mehwoot 10y ago
    The more technical details you include the more people pick up and discuss minute technical details instead of the point of what I was trying to say, which is that my experience with a large codebase was these modern javascript tools have solved a lot of problems we had. If you want all the gory details here they are: it was a Rails 3 app using Postgres and Elasticsearch that we migrated to React + node.js + webpack + babel, elastic search as the data store and using Keystone.js for backend data manipulation (which uses mongodb). Rails was indexing its data in Elasticsearch already so we could start serving data through node.js immediately without having to migrate all the data backend, which is being slowly moved to keystone.js.

jbrauer 10y ago

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( I've only been at it for about 2-3 years, and I must say, I feel this exact same way. Started on the LAMP stack in school and now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" and outdated since MEAN and all of the encompassing JS libraries have become popular. I caved and started to dabble in MEAN (even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long shot yet..) and must say it is the most fun I have had while coding and setting up projects ever, however I can't help but feel it is like you say, "a frigging nightmare to maintain and deploy". Nothing seems intuitive...

talmand 10y ago
>> now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" You want to know what's "uncool" around here for me? Wanting to markup a table with table elements, mostly for the accessibility benefits. I've never seen such an odd pushback. Tables are so "old" I'm told.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Actually, what people frown upon is using tables for layout. Using them to display actual tabular data is quite fine. (I mean, everything is fine at the end of the day as long as the end-user is happy, but you know what I mean...)
  - talmand 10y ago
    No, you don't understand. I don't want to use tables for layout, I want to use tables to display a good old-fashioned table. A table displayed in an otherwise normally marked up page. That is what's getting the pushback. I guess I could say I want to use table elements to layout a table, which would trigger the "don't use tables for layout" argument.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      So... ignore them? If you want to use a table for tabular data, then please - use a table! If someone whines you've used a table, then ignore their whining and keep using table markup for tabular data.

groovy2shoes 10y ago

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( You’re doing it wrong. You’re not the one who should feel bad, they are the ones who should feel bad! You’re in the right. Try doing what I do: wave your cane around and shout at them to get off your lawn. Be sure to really drive it home by telling them the same two or three stories over and over again, about how things were back in “your day”[0] :) In all seriousness, I sympathized with every thing you said until that very last sentence. For whatever reason, I never feel bad —— I just “know” that my way is the better way, and that their ways are just fashionable fads and will pass. If I turn out to be wrong and any of those things happens to wind up sticking, well... I’ll cross that bridge when I get there ;) -- [0]: E.g., how much more vivid color was, how much brighter the day was, how much tastier the food was, how it was the Golden Age of Television, Film, Literature, Music, Journalism, and Politics, how men were men and you could tell them from boys by whether or not they had correctly implemented call-by-name argument-passing semantics in their Algol-60 compilers, and how everything was just generally better. “What’s that? Your Web page is 32MB minified and gzipped? Back in my day, we only had 32MB of RAM total, if we were lucky, and we could still listen to mp3s and browse the Web and send snarky messages instantly to one another even then. Sure, our displays were tiny, low-resolution CRTs, and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!!” /me listlessly stares 1000 yards past his junior developers...

sunshiney 10y ago
sits here stunned at how perfectly you described my young adult days....

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago

'gulp or grunt' are these actual JavaScript libraries/frameworks? Or are you referring to human bodily noises?

ofcapl_ 10y ago

I'm soo 100% like You. I've found my own stack of choice - requirejs+jade(pug)+npm scripts(to parse requirejs and ES6 with babel) just do my job - no matter if it is a front-end or mobile one. I've also add to it Express.js if want to build something full-stack - no front-end frameworks, just jade(pug) and own way of files organization etc. Sometimes I have worse day and think that I'm behind new hyped stuff but then I realise that my way just works without any fancy setup..

ofcapl_ 10y ago
in addition, I've took a look on react/ember/angular etc. but it just doesn't fit me - but at the same time I've took some principles from every of them and use it in my projects (e.g. code modularity)

clifanatic 10y ago

> the tendency is to pull in Angular, Laravel, gulp or grunt, composer dependencies and a whole host of code for doing something really simple. First experience with Resume Driven Development?