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I've been doing frontend dev for 10 years and had to change my stack & way of working only 3 times: - HTML templates (served by Symfony/ASP.NET/Rails/Django) +

I've been doing frontend dev for 10 years and had to change my stack & way of working only 3 times: - HTML templates (served by Symfony/ASP.NET/Rails/Django) + jQuery + dependencies manually downloaded/updated/deleted/added to the index.html - ~2014: Angular SPA + Grunt + dependencies managed with Bower and added manually in the index.html - ~2017: React SPA + Webpack/Babel + dependencies managed with NPM and added automatically in the index.html with Webpack. The last one is by far the stack with which I'm the most productive and I encounter the less bugs. I feel like frontend dev is finally mature and enjoyable. But anyway, jumping from one stack to another one was quite easy. A few days of learning. - I've been doing backend dev for 10 years too and had to change my stack & way of working as often, if not more. Jumping from one (or several) languages/frameworks/databases/ORMs/web servers/containers/package managers/testing tools/and so on, usually take several weeks of learning. Imo, the "frontend world is crazy/changes too fast" is way over exaggerated.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
This has been about my experience too. Down to the exact technologies and years.
- shaunpersad 8y ago
  Same here! Though I never truly felt comfortable in Angular. React was a game-changer for me though.
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
This is similar to my own experiences. During the past decade the JavaScript ecosystem had to evolve and adapt to handle increasingly more advanced requirements. Multiple tools and libraries rose up to meet the challenge, and the best ones have slowly floated to the top. It's not like the winning tools are even that recent: I think Webpack was already around before 2012, TypeScript was released in 2012, and, if I remember correctly, React was released around 2013. Fun fact: babel was called 6to5 when it was initially released. Webpack can sometimes be difficult to configure because the problems which it sets out to solve are also complicated. To be fair, their old docs were quite lackluster, and the creator's coding style was uncommon, which made reading through the source a bit challenging. I know a lot of people are critical of Webpack, but I was overjoyed when I first discovered it, as it enabled me to correctly solve a huge number of issues. Once adopted, it let me drastically simplify our build pipeline, as well as our development and testing environments. I can sympathize with non-frontend developers because I also feel overwhelmed sometimes when I look at all the tooling related to backend / devops / infrastructure stuff. But I understand people build and use these tools because they're usually solving fairly complex real-world problems. I suspect that many people that complain about JavaScript don't care much about the frontend and they just want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. They want to pick up whatever standard tools the community has centered around and hammer together something without having to dive in too deep. If the developer looks down on frontend development and they encounter a difficult problem which they're unable to solve, then they must deal with the cognitive dissonance. To give a concrete example of something I've struggle with: I can barely make sense of the containers ecosystem. Using docker-compose during development to bring up an application's external dependencies is amazing. However, I generally haven't had much success configuring and using docker to run an app locally. There's always performance issues, or I can't get something to work correctly, or I can't figure out how to get a good workflow going. Since we're on the topic: if anyone knows a practical example of a regular web app (e.g. rails or node, but I'm not picky) which has a few workers and which depends on a few services (e.g. Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis, MinIO), I'd love to check it out. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned deployments and Kubernetes, which seems like a whole nother dragon. If you're not a fan of frontend development I'd suggest using server-side rendering with occasional scripts dropped in for extra functionality. Think carefully about your application and its requirements; not everything needs to be a Single Page App. Depending on the kind of application you're building, you might want to evaluate next.js [0] and create-react-app [1]. [0] https://nextjs.org/ https://nextjs.org/ [1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app
julienreszka 8y ago
I wish programming was more like playing a musical instrument. I feel like there is too much tuning not enough playing.
- Sendotsh 8y ago
  I think programming is more akin to developing and/or manufacturing instruments. Playing them would be the users.
  - throwmeback 8y ago
    I think the subparent meant the developer experience - this counts as playing as well.
- true_religion 8y ago
  Programming is a lot like playing a guitar. You can play old songs forever, but you can’t fairly complain that they went out of style. Plus like guitar, your skills at playing one genre don’t directly translate to another so if you want to keep up on the trend threadmill it takes a lot of extra practice.
dplgk 8y ago
Can you elaborate on your backend changes? I've been doing django for 10 years and still am. So for me, the biggest server-side change is dev ops, cloud, etc.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

This has been about my experience too. Down to the exact technologies and years.

shaunpersad 8y ago
Same here! Though I never truly felt comfortable in Angular. React was a game-changer for me though.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

This is similar to my own experiences. During the past decade the JavaScript ecosystem had to evolve and adapt to handle increasingly more advanced requirements. Multiple tools and libraries rose up to meet the challenge, and the best ones have slowly floated to the top. It's not like the winning tools are even that recent: I think Webpack was already around before 2012, TypeScript was released in 2012, and, if I remember correctly, React was released around 2013. Fun fact: babel was called 6to5 when it was initially released. Webpack can sometimes be difficult to configure because the problems which it sets out to solve are also complicated. To be fair, their old docs were quite lackluster, and the creator's coding style was uncommon, which made reading through the source a bit challenging. I know a lot of people are critical of Webpack, but I was overjoyed when I first discovered it, as it enabled me to correctly solve a huge number of issues. Once adopted, it let me drastically simplify our build pipeline, as well as our development and testing environments. I can sympathize with non-frontend developers because I also feel overwhelmed sometimes when I look at all the tooling related to backend / devops / infrastructure stuff. But I understand people build and use these tools because they're usually solving fairly complex real-world problems. I suspect that many people that complain about JavaScript don't care much about the frontend and they just want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. They want to pick up whatever standard tools the community has centered around and hammer together something without having to dive in too deep. If the developer looks down on frontend development and they encounter a difficult problem which they're unable to solve, then they must deal with the cognitive dissonance. To give a concrete example of something I've struggle with: I can barely make sense of the containers ecosystem. Using docker-compose during development to bring up an application's external dependencies is amazing. However, I generally haven't had much success configuring and using docker to run an app locally. There's always performance issues, or I can't get something to work correctly, or I can't figure out how to get a good workflow going. Since we're on the topic: if anyone knows a practical example of a regular web app (e.g. rails or node, but I'm not picky) which has a few workers and which depends on a few services (e.g. Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis, MinIO), I'd love to check it out. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned deployments and Kubernetes, which seems like a whole nother dragon. If you're not a fan of frontend development I'd suggest using server-side rendering with occasional scripts dropped in for extra functionality. Think carefully about your application and its requirements; not everything needs to be a Single Page App. Depending on the kind of application you're building, you might want to evaluate next.js [0] and create-react-app [1]. [0] https://nextjs.org/ https://nextjs.org/ [1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

julienreszka 8y ago

I wish programming was more like playing a musical instrument. I feel like there is too much tuning not enough playing.

Sendotsh 8y ago
I think programming is more akin to developing and/or manufacturing instruments. Playing them would be the users.
- throwmeback 8y ago
  I think the subparent meant the developer experience - this counts as playing as well.
true_religion 8y ago
Programming is a lot like playing a guitar. You can play old songs forever, but you can’t fairly complain that they went out of style. Plus like guitar, your skills at playing one genre don’t directly translate to another so if you want to keep up on the trend threadmill it takes a lot of extra practice.

dplgk 8y ago

Can you elaborate on your backend changes? I've been doing django for 10 years and still am. So for me, the biggest server-side change is dev ops, cloud, etc.