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> But I completely reject the idea that only 5 people in world are smart enough to set up their own build configs. There's a rather irritating tendency to fran

> But I completely reject the idea that only 5 people in world are smart enough to set up their own build configs. There's a rather irritating tendency to frankly insult the intelligence of anyone that's not working on $BIG_NAME_PACKAGE, as though the people working on these libraries are from outer space and not (most often) rather regular humans who've ended up on particular career paths due to planning and/or being strategically positioned at the right time. For some reason it's particularly prevalent in the JS community, where it especially does not make any sense considering that it's a very active open-source scene with plenty of people pointing out bugs and submitting fixes to popular packages every day. I wonder if it's a frontend web dev thing in general - it's common to see people make similarly hyperbolic statements about CSS (no, it's not that hard to centre a div, and even if it was it says more about you if you agonise over it every time you encounter it and not just, I don't know, save the working snippet somewhere and refer to it when you need it).

GeneralMaximus 7y ago
> There's a rather irritating tendency to frankly insult the intelligence of anyone that's not working on $BIG_NAME_PACKAGE [...] I apologize if what I said came across like that. I don't mean to insult the intelligence of people who want to roll their own build tooling, I just want to point out that doing so is a waste of time when somebody else has put in the work of building doing that for you. I would say the same thing to someone who wanted to build their own web framework instead of just using Rails/Django, or someone who wanted to build their own blog engine instead of using WordPress/Jekyll. Your time is valuable. Don't waste it on writing Webpack configs. Of course, if you're doing any of this to learn how things work, then more power to you! But if you're putting hand-rolled versions of popular frameworks and libraries in production, then you're doing a disservice to those who have to maintain those things after you've left your job. I can say with confidence that most posters on HN (including myself) will do a worse job at setting up a build system than CRA. There are hundreds of contributors fixing issues in CRA, and all of them are really smart people. It's an open-source project with thousands of eyes looking at the code. I doubt that a lone developer working in a silo could come up with something better.

GeneralMaximus 7y ago

> There's a rather irritating tendency to frankly insult the intelligence of anyone that's not working on $BIG_NAME_PACKAGE [...] I apologize if what I said came across like that. I don't mean to insult the intelligence of people who want to roll their own build tooling, I just want to point out that doing so is a waste of time when somebody else has put in the work of building doing that for you. I would say the same thing to someone who wanted to build their own web framework instead of just using Rails/Django, or someone who wanted to build their own blog engine instead of using WordPress/Jekyll. Your time is valuable. Don't waste it on writing Webpack configs. Of course, if you're doing any of this to learn how things work, then more power to you! But if you're putting hand-rolled versions of popular frameworks and libraries in production, then you're doing a disservice to those who have to maintain those things after you've left your job. I can say with confidence that most posters on HN (including myself) will do a worse job at setting up a build system than CRA. There are hundreds of contributors fixing issues in CRA, and all of them are really smart people. It's an open-source project with thousands of eyes looking at the code. I doubt that a lone developer working in a silo could come up with something better.