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I have a theory that pretty much every developer saying "X is best for Y" is simply believing what a developer relations engineer or evangelist has said to them

I have a theory that pretty much every developer saying "X is best for Y" is simply believing what a developer relations engineer or evangelist has said to them at a conference (or they read on a blog post, or heard 5th hand from a dev they know). What they fail to realise is that people who work in dev rel jobs are paid to promote a product. Next.js is wildly popular because the dev rel team are excellent devs who produce fantastic content, but they're paid to promote Vercel and Next, and they do it well, but they don't mention where it isn't a good fit. Consequently every frontend dev claims Next is the answer to everything, and then builds a site that doesn't work very well because it doesn't fit Next's model. I'm singling out Next but it's not limited to that framework. I like Next. I use it. I spent weeks working out if it could do what I need before I started. The problem isn't Next, it's applying Next where it doesn't fit. This is true for everything that has paid promoters. You have to do your homework. You can't blindly trust what the internet says. When the dev industry stops conflating the opinion of someone paid to promote a product with stop cold facts that apply to everything then things will improve.

fullstackchris 4y ago
I'm of the exact same opinion, but I've mostly given up on repeating similar notions. I think it's unlikely to change: I read something once that there are about 20 devs on all of twitter that generate 90% of all the tech chatter and hype. Some days it feels the everybody software industry puts their trust in a handful of famous ex-<insert FANGG> here or famous youtubers / bloggers and takes what they say as undeniable truth (Though this is true for nearly everything nowadays, everything trite, washed down, and summarized with no heart or nuance) There's a great saying in German: "Die kochen auch nur mit Wasser" - They also cook only with water. Sure, some of these youtubers and bloggers are super smart and helpful, and there are brilliant people who have worked at Silicon Valley companies. But there are smart, helpful, and brilliant people at nearly every company around the world. It just so happens that not all of them blog, have a twitter, or have youtube channels. Sorry for the oldmanish grumbling but the more I learn about this industry is that everything is about picking the right tool for the job, documenting the arcane decisions made, and managing all of those decisions. When you really start getting into the weeds, the (IMHO) junior level ideals of 'perfectly clean code' and '100% code coverage' rapidly go out the window. We're _maintainers_ of complex systems, not wizards with panaceas. 100% of the time it is picking the tool for the job, and know what you are doing with that tool. Experimenting? Great. Learning something new? Great. Just don't lumber into your organization one day saying "we should do X or Y because its the hype, or Z said so". Many painful stories can be shared on this type of mentality.
baobob 4y ago
A complementary (and fairly easy to demonstrate) theory is that few would be using Next if it weren't for the paid promotion. Doesn't that basically make Vercel a kind of shitcoin?
makeitdouble 4y ago
This effect is probably accelerated by most teams wanting a limited set of technologies and lower mental burden. The “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” adage makes fun of that, but in practice most people would hate maintaining their main project in Next, a tooling project in Vue, and some other stuff on the side in Knockout and a legacy project in Angular. So for anything that is vaguely in reach of Next/react, keep using it makes more sense than switch to a slightly more adapted framework just for that single thing.
gear54rus 4y ago
What use cases are not good for next? In my experience it doesn't get in your way that much so I wonder what task did you find it can't do.

fullstackchris 4y ago

I'm of the exact same opinion, but I've mostly given up on repeating similar notions. I think it's unlikely to change: I read something once that there are about 20 devs on all of twitter that generate 90% of all the tech chatter and hype. Some days it feels the everybody software industry puts their trust in a handful of famous ex-<insert FANGG> here or famous youtubers / bloggers and takes what they say as undeniable truth (Though this is true for nearly everything nowadays, everything trite, washed down, and summarized with no heart or nuance) There's a great saying in German: "Die kochen auch nur mit Wasser" - They also cook only with water. Sure, some of these youtubers and bloggers are super smart and helpful, and there are brilliant people who have worked at Silicon Valley companies. But there are smart, helpful, and brilliant people at nearly every company around the world. It just so happens that not all of them blog, have a twitter, or have youtube channels. Sorry for the oldmanish grumbling but the more I learn about this industry is that everything is about picking the right tool for the job, documenting the arcane decisions made, and managing all of those decisions. When you really start getting into the weeds, the (IMHO) junior level ideals of 'perfectly clean code' and '100% code coverage' rapidly go out the window. We're _maintainers_ of complex systems, not wizards with panaceas. 100% of the time it is picking the tool for the job, and know what you are doing with that tool. Experimenting? Great. Learning something new? Great. Just don't lumber into your organization one day saying "we should do X or Y because its the hype, or Z said so". Many painful stories can be shared on this type of mentality.

baobob 4y ago

A complementary (and fairly easy to demonstrate) theory is that few would be using Next if it weren't for the paid promotion. Doesn't that basically make Vercel a kind of shitcoin?

makeitdouble 4y ago

This effect is probably accelerated by most teams wanting a limited set of technologies and lower mental burden. The “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” adage makes fun of that, but in practice most people would hate maintaining their main project in Next, a tooling project in Vue, and some other stuff on the side in Knockout and a legacy project in Angular. So for anything that is vaguely in reach of Next/react, keep using it makes more sense than switch to a slightly more adapted framework just for that single thing.

gear54rus 4y ago

What use cases are not good for next? In my experience it doesn't get in your way that much so I wonder what task did you find it can't do.