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Well, here’s the thing, the pragmatic developer is not his market. It’s the newbies or those who are deeply associating their new career with the identity of a

Well, here’s the thing, the pragmatic developer is not his market. It’s the newbies or those who are deeply associating their new career with the identity of a ‘legit’ developer. This is the group that will pay him. It’s really none of my business, one can spend their time and money however they like. But, they do show up to work and advocate for these types of setups and that leads to bad codebases. I’m not sure how any of us can solve it since Frontend is the port of entry for vast swaths of career-changers and new grads. Then again, I also see the over-engineering on devops, a group that should be a little more experienced. I don’t know where people get these ideas, so we might all be correct in shaking our fist at the Kent C Dobb types for fundamentally being a bad influence. Just taking a look at one part of the stack, Xstate, how anyone can advocate for this is, I really just don’t know. This is a simple todo list example from it’s docs: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate/tree/main/examples/todo-mvc-react/src https://github.com/statelyai/xstate/tree/main/examples/todo-... Eh, I give up. I really have no words for any of this.

vgrafe 5y ago
You put into words my exact experience with his influence on someone in my team a while ago. It was exhausting to have someone add complexity to our react codebase i.e. through render props + “accessor pattern”. It had a significant cost in code reviews and refactors.
franciscop 5y ago
As a front-end myself with my share of experience (Senior-Staff level), I've found a way of answering this "I’m not sure how any of us can solve it" is by building credibility on yourself and on your tools. It's a bit of an uphill battle, but def doable. When I build a small tool/webapp in 1-2 weeks, using "simple, dumb" technology (even within the React ecosystem), while some of my colleagues take 1+ month to build similarly complicated webapp, and after few months of usages there are 0 reported bugs in my apps and they are still cleaning edge cases. Then I'm usually brought in to help on some of these projects, and most of my PRs look deep in the red (removing more lines than adding) while still adding features/fixing bugs. That shows part my experience, but also often the better use of the tools.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  The problem is by the 3rd-4th project you are brought on to help, you pretty much become jaded. How many times can one deal with it without losing patience? While this whole thread has been a whiplashing on the OP, it’s only happening because they seem to not get it and continue propagating stacks and layered complexity of this sort. In fact, they are literally selling it to the most impressionable without paying a dime of the consequences (suffering through the n-th over abstracted codebase). I’ve lost patience.
davidkpiano 5y ago
I'm planning on replacing the TodoMVC example and use a more real-world example. However, Kent is only using XState in one non-trivial interactive part of the site – the call recorder: https://github.com/kentcdodds/kentcdodds.com/blob/main/app/components/calls/recorder.tsx#L66-L206 https://github.com/kentcdodds/kentcdodds.com/blob/main/app/c... Seems to me like a proper use of a state machine (I might be biased, though).

vgrafe 5y ago

You put into words my exact experience with his influence on someone in my team a while ago. It was exhausting to have someone add complexity to our react codebase i.e. through render props + “accessor pattern”. It had a significant cost in code reviews and refactors.

franciscop 5y ago

As a front-end myself with my share of experience (Senior-Staff level), I've found a way of answering this "I’m not sure how any of us can solve it" is by building credibility on yourself and on your tools. It's a bit of an uphill battle, but def doable. When I build a small tool/webapp in 1-2 weeks, using "simple, dumb" technology (even within the React ecosystem), while some of my colleagues take 1+ month to build similarly complicated webapp, and after few months of usages there are 0 reported bugs in my apps and they are still cleaning edge cases. Then I'm usually brought in to help on some of these projects, and most of my PRs look deep in the red (removing more lines than adding) while still adding features/fixing bugs. That shows part my experience, but also often the better use of the tools.

crate_barre 5y ago
The problem is by the 3rd-4th project you are brought on to help, you pretty much become jaded. How many times can one deal with it without losing patience? While this whole thread has been a whiplashing on the OP, it’s only happening because they seem to not get it and continue propagating stacks and layered complexity of this sort. In fact, they are literally selling it to the most impressionable without paying a dime of the consequences (suffering through the n-th over abstracted codebase). I’ve lost patience.

davidkpiano 5y ago

I'm planning on replacing the TodoMVC example and use a more real-world example. However, Kent is only using XState in one non-trivial interactive part of the site – the call recorder: https://github.com/kentcdodds/kentcdodds.com/blob/main/app/components/calls/recorder.tsx#L66-L206 https://github.com/kentcdodds/kentcdodds.com/blob/main/app/c... Seems to me like a proper use of a state machine (I might be biased, though).