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Migrating Pinterest profiles to React
- untilHellbanned 10y agoWe did this cause it's the new hot thing. Makes sense.
- kamyarg 10y agoNo, because it is easier to find good react developers vs. finding good backbone ones, because it is more widely used. note: no affiliation with pinterest.
- adamors 10y agoI'm sorry but are you serious? Any decent front-end dev should be able to be proficient in React in a week.
- pjmlp 10y agoTo me it seems just like wasting money instead of using the same money to produce business value. Apparently some developers cannot do math, salary-per-hour * effort-spent.
- niketn 10y agoI believe the 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement alone justifies the effort. Otherwise, the choice of React in this instance is great because you can fail quickly (easy to learn + very easy to start integrating), therefore being able to stop blowouts before they arise.
- pjmlp 10y agoThe question is if those 20% weren't also equally attainable by improving the existing code instead of porting to a new stack.
- oliverkyss 10y agoWhat question? You seem to have already decided on the answer without asking anything.
- pjmlp 10y agoIs it possible to achieve 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement by improving existing code instead of fully rewriting it in another technology stack? What would be the monetary cost of such decision versus the monetary cost of the one taken? Which approach would achieve the same value of 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement with lower amount of money being spent?
- Bahamut 10y agoThere are more factors than that - a lot of good developers will bail if there is not progress made on updating the frontend stack, especially if the technology is outdated/problematic to work with. In addition, it becomes harder to hire if the technology is too far behind. It often is an indicator that the company doesn't invest enough into engineering because they let their state fall into not up to date codebases. This results in vastly increased recruiting costs, time lost, and decreased quality of life for those who stay. It's not as simple as a direct calculation. It's very misleading to assume that one can simply shift resources into product feature development and not necessarily incur tradeoffs.
- pjmlp 10y agoWhich is why I bet in three years time they will be redoing everything again in Vue.js, or whatever comes after React.
- ng12 10y agoThat's fine. My favorite thing about React is that it's not opinionated -- it follows simple, easy to understand conventions that are not unique to React. It's also compostable from the ground up meaning it's easy to use React in non-React code and vice-versa. I don't think Vue will replace React for this reason (it's much closer to old DOM-munging style) but if something does its much less of a big deal than going from Backbone->React.
- awatlits 10y ago"It has a large developer community and enables excellent engineering velocity and performance"...
- mattmanser 10y agoLiterally 3 years ago you could have said the same about Backbone. And 2 years ago you could have said the same thing about Angular. And now you can say it about React. Are we to expect the next article from Pinterest about [angular 2, vue, elm, etc.] in two years time?
- praneshp 10y agoWhy is that wrong? Shouldn't you be on the best framework, especially when 2 years have passed?
- mattmanser 10y agoIt's attitudes like this that are getting us into this mess. If a framework's only been around for a year, which means nothing serious has been written in it, how can you know its limitations? It's appropriateness for large code bases?
- mercer 10y ago3 years ago React didn't exist. 2 year ago Angular didn't exist. Apparently there's still a lot of room for improvement, and much as I'd love for things to settle down soon, I've been very happy that I'm not stuck with jQuery or Backbone as the only tools in my belt!
- RussianCow 10y ago> 3 years ago React didn't exist. 2 year ago Angular didn't exist. Not to nitpick, but React has been around since summer 2013, and Angular 1.0 was released on June 14, 2012, so these libraries have definitely existed for more than 3 years. That said, I think that plays even more to your point that there are 3+ years of positive changes to be gained from switching from Backbone to React.
- indexerror 10y agoAlso because it is better. "In converting Pinners’ profiles to React, we’ve seen consistent performance and engagement improvements. Performance and engagement metrics each have increased 20 percent."
- mbrock 10y agoIt's such a knee jerk reaction by now: anyone who replaces a part of their system with another technology must be doing it for stupid reasons. Especially if the new thing is React...
- _pmf_ 10y ago> We did this cause it's the new hot thing. Makes sense. The Chief Javascript Wheel-Reinventing Officer has asked around his fraternity and decided that it's a good idea.
- oliverkyss 10y agoWhat wheel does React reinvent?
- pjmlp 10y agoReplacing an existing working stack without a business case, just because.
- b34r 10y agoNo... React is a fundamentally new way of working with the DOM, normalizes many cross browser pain points, and allows one to write their UI declaratively such that total control is retained and state mutations are predictable. No other major view libraries had successfully done that before React was released. I've used angular and ember as well - their view layers suck.
- simonw 10y agoWhat does react do for cross-browser pain points? I've not heard that claim before.
- young_greedo 10y agoDid you actually take the time to read the article?
- 5ilv3r 10y agoProtip for anyone trying to avoid this site's spam: include -site:www.pinterest.com in your google search terms. --Love, the annoyed admin.
- ecesena 10y agoIt would be nice to see some more numbers, e.g. page size, load time, etc. (and perhaps some critical analysis of the cost you have to pay in the transition period, where your clients for example need to load both frameworks).