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My experience is that it's just as relevant today. I had a front-end developer come in and add node, bootstrap, and SCSS as a dependency to a very simple app.

My experience is that it's just as relevant today. I had a front-end developer come in and add node, bootstrap, and SCSS as a dependency to a very simple app. We went from having a super simple build chain to one that now needed maintenance. And part of his argument? he "thought better" in SCSS. People have zero respect for the risk of dependencies, complicating the buildchain, or long term maintenance.

pbalau 6y ago
It's a combination of arrogance, lack of skill and sheer stupidity. For an example, look at nuxtjs docs, there is an example config, that everyone seem to use, that lints on each build. Because code using 4 spaces indentation is slower than code using 2 spaces... The last ui dev I had to work with managed to produce in about 1 year a very complicated dockerfile, that was spewing, between other things, an image for e2e testing - but no actual tests and you needed a huge makefile to actually build the thing, a soup of copy-pasted config files that resulted in a vendors.js bundle of about 100 megs - there were more config files than source code, 2 branches named <username>.wip.somedate with commits that commented out some parts of a config, just to uncomment them back in the next commit. The app itself, with ssr no less, was a logo and some text, that was using some custom components, built with some third party vue component that was rendering css in js, thus you had to wait for the entire vendors.js to download before you got anything rendered. His answer to anyone questioning his choices was "this is how modern ux development works". After he was let go, I took over the ui and along with another coworker we managed to have a working version of the app in 9 days, with no prior knowledge of vuejs and nuxtjs. You can imagine how complicated the app is...
ericwood 6y ago
I find this universally true in every corner of the stack and it has more to do with experience than anything else. It’s hardly “all front enders do this always.” Still, to my point, the tools mentioned here have existed for a very long time with very large communities and are hardly the new shiny thing. Your complaint here seems to be more around using the wrong tool for the job.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but it's particularly bad on the frontend. This particular frontend person had convinced the owner of the company that there were things you could do in SCSS that you couldn't do in CSS. I had to explain to said owner that SCSS was compiled down to CSS because the browser didn't understand SCSS. That you literally couldn't do anything in SCSS that wasn't allowed in CSS. The owner ended up having a come to jesus moment when he tried to take all of the tools that frontend developer added and make them available in docker so that no one else had to install custom development tools. He spent several days, failed on it, and realized exactly why I was being so hardheaded about the build chain. We never ended up getting rid of those dependencies, but I know the owner finally understood my point. Instead the team bifurcated into those who had their local environment setup to be able to successfully work on the frontend, and those who didn't.

pbalau 6y ago

It's a combination of arrogance, lack of skill and sheer stupidity. For an example, look at nuxtjs docs, there is an example config, that everyone seem to use, that lints on each build. Because code using 4 spaces indentation is slower than code using 2 spaces... The last ui dev I had to work with managed to produce in about 1 year a very complicated dockerfile, that was spewing, between other things, an image for e2e testing - but no actual tests and you needed a huge makefile to actually build the thing, a soup of copy-pasted config files that resulted in a vendors.js bundle of about 100 megs - there were more config files than source code, 2 branches named <username>.wip.somedate with commits that commented out some parts of a config, just to uncomment them back in the next commit. The app itself, with ssr no less, was a logo and some text, that was using some custom components, built with some third party vue component that was rendering css in js, thus you had to wait for the entire vendors.js to download before you got anything rendered. His answer to anyone questioning his choices was "this is how modern ux development works". After he was let go, I took over the ui and along with another coworker we managed to have a working version of the app in 9 days, with no prior knowledge of vuejs and nuxtjs. You can imagine how complicated the app is...

ericwood 6y ago

I find this universally true in every corner of the stack and it has more to do with experience than anything else. It’s hardly “all front enders do this always.” Still, to my point, the tools mentioned here have existed for a very long time with very large communities and are hardly the new shiny thing. Your complaint here seems to be more around using the wrong tool for the job.

RandoHolmes 6y ago
I don't disagree, but it's particularly bad on the frontend. This particular frontend person had convinced the owner of the company that there were things you could do in SCSS that you couldn't do in CSS. I had to explain to said owner that SCSS was compiled down to CSS because the browser didn't understand SCSS. That you literally couldn't do anything in SCSS that wasn't allowed in CSS. The owner ended up having a come to jesus moment when he tried to take all of the tools that frontend developer added and make them available in docker so that no one else had to install custom development tools. He spent several days, failed on it, and realized exactly why I was being so hardheaded about the build chain. We never ended up getting rid of those dependencies, but I know the owner finally understood my point. Instead the team bifurcated into those who had their local environment setup to be able to successfully work on the frontend, and those who didn't.