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That's really stretching the definition of "professional work". If you're just gluing third party components and libraries together you're going to end up with

by tmpz22 8y ago

That's really stretching the definition of "professional work". If you're just gluing third party components and libraries together you're going to end up with a bloated mess. This is why javascript/front-end developers get so much flak - there is a prevailing opinion that you can just fake it and not bother to learn best practices, not bother to test, and not bother to care about performance. If you do not consistently produce work of professional quality you just might not be a professional.

tptacek 8y ago
If you've invested the time to derive a first-principles understanding of why every element in a React environment works the way it does, and what the alternatives are, and why you're going to use any given alternative, I can understand being irritated with the idea that there's a happy path that people can traverse to get to your level of productivity with 1/50th the amount of effort. What I don't really get is the reason why their work is going to be less professional and effective than yours will be; among other things, they're much less likely to pointlessly reinvent wheels. Really, the critique you're delivering applies only to a couple of the points I'm making, and, subtextually, it really applies primarily to the use of CSS/React frameworks like Bootstrap and Material and Foundation and Grommet. I think an ordinary developer can throw a dart to pick any of those frameworks and end up with better, less-janky, more usable UI than they would get by DIY'ing it first (and, inevitably, adopting a framework anyways). It's a weird quirk of web development, not shared by any of the other kinds of front end development I've been exposed to in the ~22 years I've been shipping code, that "pro" UI has to be done from scratch. WinAPI and OSX developers get UI toolkits from the platform vendor, and while you might work outside those toolkits for some custom stuff, eschewing it entirely will get you looked at funny. But use a decent UI toolkit on the web and you're "just gluing third party components together".
- statictype 8y ago
  Its not so much about re-inventing the wheel but more about understanding how the underlying system actually works. So yes, go ahead and use a framework if that helps but when your UI Designer gives you something that doesnt neatly fit into a framework component you need to know enough to implement it yourself right? Also - understanding how it actually works also helps when the JS community rallies around the next big thing 6 months down the road. I still find a lot of devs who cant do basic DOM manipulation without pulling in a jquery dependency. I’m by no means a full time UI/front end dev - I do it when I have to. Over the years as css has improved and my understanding has improved I find myself less inclined to use a framework because doing it yourself isnt difficult and you’re not stuck fixing bugs and issues in the underlying framework and fighting against it to do whatever weird thing your design requires.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I don't know if "difficult" is the word I would use. Is a mail merge in Microsoft Word "difficult"? I think probably not. But it would still take me longer to get a mail merge working in Office than it would for me to implement and test a topological sort or a breadth-first graph traversal. That's approximately how I feel about the level of difficulty involved in DIY-ing CSS and layout. I could get really good at it, I'm sure --- but why would I? Other people got these details right already, and did a better job of it than I would (it was, at the time, the most important thing they worked on, and a perfectly laid-out button or sidebar is always going to be very far down the list of most important thing I work on). Honestly --- and this isn't fair but I am just being candid about my impressions --- the pushback I see to relying on frameworks reads to me as a combination of specialist front-end people feeling threatened and of dilettante developers being irritated that something might be invented somewhere other than here. But if you're using React at all, hasn't that ship sailed? Oh, wait, there are like 10 bespoke vdom JS frameworks now, so I guess it hasn't. Buttons, sidebar, grid systems, and vdom libraries are commodities to me. I think they are and should be commodities to 80-90+% of all applications that get built anywhere. Build an online pharmacy or trading position and inventory tracker or continuous integration system or CDN console and I guarantee you that nobody who pays money for it will give a shit whether your buttons came from Foundation or you lovingly handcrafted them yourself.
    - statictype 8y ago
      I dont disagree with you. I guess you’re coming at this from “I need to put this together and it needs to look decent.” I’m coming at this from “here are the psds from our design team - go implement that”
      - tptacek 8y ago
        In my experience consulting for basically every kind of company that ever makes software, most front-end development follows the former pattern, not the latter. I agree preemptively that you aren't going to get a job on the front-end team at Square without an intimate knowledge of how modern HTML layout works. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve with posts like these; rather, it's "where do I start". Here's where to start.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > there’s a happy path The problem is that (if there really is such a happy path) it’s different for every person, dependent on that person’s previous experience, and impossible to determine until you know all the other stuff. You don’t know what you don’t know, and somebody who’s advising you ALSO doesn’t know what you don’t know. I’ve tried, over and over again, to “just do it” instead of taking things slowly and deliberately (especially because I always have a boss breathing down my neck to “get it done already”) and I always run into completely inexplicable stack traces that Google and StackOverflow can’t help me with. (Or is it just me?). However, when I finally bite the bullet and take the “hit” for the lost productivity spent reading the documentation, working through smaller, simpler examples before building up to the “real” production application, everything is clear, the stack traces make sense, and the application works like it should. The only problem is having to account to the merciless time tracking system for the week or two that I “wasted” on something as trivial as “learning”.
  - afarrell 8y ago
    I, too, need to understand how the things I’m using work before I am able to use them efficiently.
    - commandlinefan 8y ago
      Whew, I thought I was just crazy.
      - afarrell 8y ago
        I’ve been where you are. Its not a good place. There are better workplaces.
- csomar 8y ago
  > It's a weird quirk of web development, not shared by any of the other kinds of front end development I've been exposed to in the ~22 years I've been shipping code, that "pro" UI has to be done from scratch. Back in the 2004-2008 these frameworks were not well maintained and their coverage (the amount of elements/styles) they have was very small. They also were, uh, pretty ugly. I think that what made my opinion about them at the time. But things have changed. Bootstrap now is well used, maintained and you can purchase professional styles for it.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    For (on a limb here) ~80% of all applications built professionally, making it look better or even just different from the default Bootstrap look-and-feel is a waste of time and money. Users don't care. There are applications where they do care. The pathology is, people who talk about UI development online act as if the ratio were reversed, and that not looking like stock Bootstrap should be a top-of-mind concern for people building random business applications.
lucideer 8y ago
Interesting perspective: I think the precise opposite is true. Redux, react-router, design patterns are gluing third party components together. The number of people who blindly run create-react-app without a hint of real understanding of what boilerplate it installs, or how many dependencies it pulls in, what those components do, is overwhelming. You're right: the prevailing opinion is that you can just fake it; drop in redux, follow a nice straightforward guide on creating some actions and reducers step by step without having to make any real architectural decisions about application state or even fully understand the mechanics of dispatch lifecycle. (Note: not a criticism of Redux, Redux is fine, rather a criticism of any ecosystem where hordes of relative beginners run automated boilerplate generators and slap together convention-over-configuration apps run on the most populist trending paradigm with no attempt to understand the—possibly very good—reasons these patterns became fashionable) tptacek is pointing out that one can focus on learning your individual components (general definition of the word, not React.Component) properly, rather than learning the "way" to put all the recommended bits together at a high level and not understand each deeply. e.g. learn React, rather than trying to learn React+Redux+router; it will give you a much more professional understanding of the boundaries between these dependencies too. > If you do not consistently produce work of professional quality you just might not be a professional. I'm sorry but this sentence comes across a little conceited. If you are unable to grok the composition of your own product how can you even begin to ascertain its quality?

by tmpz22 8y ago

tptacek 8y ago

If you've invested the time to derive a first-principles understanding of why every element in a React environment works the way it does, and what the alternatives are, and why you're going to use any given alternative, I can understand being irritated with the idea that there's a happy path that people can traverse to get to your level of productivity with 1/50th the amount of effort. What I don't really get is the reason why their work is going to be less professional and effective than yours will be; among other things, they're much less likely to pointlessly reinvent wheels. Really, the critique you're delivering applies only to a couple of the points I'm making, and, subtextually, it really applies primarily to the use of CSS/React frameworks like Bootstrap and Material and Foundation and Grommet. I think an ordinary developer can throw a dart to pick any of those frameworks and end up with better, less-janky, more usable UI than they would get by DIY'ing it first (and, inevitably, adopting a framework anyways). It's a weird quirk of web development, not shared by any of the other kinds of front end development I've been exposed to in the ~22 years I've been shipping code, that "pro" UI has to be done from scratch. WinAPI and OSX developers get UI toolkits from the platform vendor, and while you might work outside those toolkits for some custom stuff, eschewing it entirely will get you looked at funny. But use a decent UI toolkit on the web and you're "just gluing third party components together".

statictype 8y ago
Its not so much about re-inventing the wheel but more about understanding how the underlying system actually works. So yes, go ahead and use a framework if that helps but when your UI Designer gives you something that doesnt neatly fit into a framework component you need to know enough to implement it yourself right? Also - understanding how it actually works also helps when the JS community rallies around the next big thing 6 months down the road. I still find a lot of devs who cant do basic DOM manipulation without pulling in a jquery dependency. I’m by no means a full time UI/front end dev - I do it when I have to. Over the years as css has improved and my understanding has improved I find myself less inclined to use a framework because doing it yourself isnt difficult and you’re not stuck fixing bugs and issues in the underlying framework and fighting against it to do whatever weird thing your design requires.
- tptacek 8y ago
  I don't know if "difficult" is the word I would use. Is a mail merge in Microsoft Word "difficult"? I think probably not. But it would still take me longer to get a mail merge working in Office than it would for me to implement and test a topological sort or a breadth-first graph traversal. That's approximately how I feel about the level of difficulty involved in DIY-ing CSS and layout. I could get really good at it, I'm sure --- but why would I? Other people got these details right already, and did a better job of it than I would (it was, at the time, the most important thing they worked on, and a perfectly laid-out button or sidebar is always going to be very far down the list of most important thing I work on). Honestly --- and this isn't fair but I am just being candid about my impressions --- the pushback I see to relying on frameworks reads to me as a combination of specialist front-end people feeling threatened and of dilettante developers being irritated that something might be invented somewhere other than here. But if you're using React at all, hasn't that ship sailed? Oh, wait, there are like 10 bespoke vdom JS frameworks now, so I guess it hasn't. Buttons, sidebar, grid systems, and vdom libraries are commodities to me. I think they are and should be commodities to 80-90+% of all applications that get built anywhere. Build an online pharmacy or trading position and inventory tracker or continuous integration system or CDN console and I guarantee you that nobody who pays money for it will give a shit whether your buttons came from Foundation or you lovingly handcrafted them yourself.
  - statictype 8y ago
    I dont disagree with you. I guess you’re coming at this from “I need to put this together and it needs to look decent.” I’m coming at this from “here are the psds from our design team - go implement that”
    - tptacek 8y ago
      In my experience consulting for basically every kind of company that ever makes software, most front-end development follows the former pattern, not the latter. I agree preemptively that you aren't going to get a job on the front-end team at Square without an intimate knowledge of how modern HTML layout works. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve with posts like these; rather, it's "where do I start". Here's where to start.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> there’s a happy path The problem is that (if there really is such a happy path) it’s different for every person, dependent on that person’s previous experience, and impossible to determine until you know all the other stuff. You don’t know what you don’t know, and somebody who’s advising you ALSO doesn’t know what you don’t know. I’ve tried, over and over again, to “just do it” instead of taking things slowly and deliberately (especially because I always have a boss breathing down my neck to “get it done already”) and I always run into completely inexplicable stack traces that Google and StackOverflow can’t help me with. (Or is it just me?). However, when I finally bite the bullet and take the “hit” for the lost productivity spent reading the documentation, working through smaller, simpler examples before building up to the “real” production application, everything is clear, the stack traces make sense, and the application works like it should. The only problem is having to account to the merciless time tracking system for the week or two that I “wasted” on something as trivial as “learning”.
- afarrell 8y ago
  I, too, need to understand how the things I’m using work before I am able to use them efficiently.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    Whew, I thought I was just crazy.
    - afarrell 8y ago
      I’ve been where you are. Its not a good place. There are better workplaces.
csomar 8y ago
> It's a weird quirk of web development, not shared by any of the other kinds of front end development I've been exposed to in the ~22 years I've been shipping code, that "pro" UI has to be done from scratch. Back in the 2004-2008 these frameworks were not well maintained and their coverage (the amount of elements/styles) they have was very small. They also were, uh, pretty ugly. I think that what made my opinion about them at the time. But things have changed. Bootstrap now is well used, maintained and you can purchase professional styles for it.
- tptacek 8y ago
  For (on a limb here) ~80% of all applications built professionally, making it look better or even just different from the default Bootstrap look-and-feel is a waste of time and money. Users don't care. There are applications where they do care. The pathology is, people who talk about UI development online act as if the ratio were reversed, and that not looking like stock Bootstrap should be a top-of-mind concern for people building random business applications.

lucideer 8y ago

Interesting perspective: I think the precise opposite is true. Redux, react-router, design patterns are gluing third party components together. The number of people who blindly run create-react-app without a hint of real understanding of what boilerplate it installs, or how many dependencies it pulls in, what those components do, is overwhelming. You're right: the prevailing opinion is that you can just fake it; drop in redux, follow a nice straightforward guide on creating some actions and reducers step by step without having to make any real architectural decisions about application state or even fully understand the mechanics of dispatch lifecycle. (Note: not a criticism of Redux, Redux is fine, rather a criticism of any ecosystem where hordes of relative beginners run automated boilerplate generators and slap together convention-over-configuration apps run on the most populist trending paradigm with no attempt to understand the—possibly very good—reasons these patterns became fashionable) tptacek is pointing out that one can focus on learning your individual components (general definition of the word, not React.Component) properly, rather than learning the "way" to put all the recommended bits together at a high level and not understand each deeply. e.g. learn React, rather than trying to learn React+Redux+router; it will give you a much more professional understanding of the boundaries between these dependencies too. > If you do not consistently produce work of professional quality you just might not be a professional. I'm sorry but this sentence comes across a little conceited. If you are unable to grok the composition of your own product how can you even begin to ascertain its quality?