6 ms·

I can't keep up with this stuff anymore. As a former "full stack" dev, I just quit the frontend part altogether and I'm now just focusing on the backend. It's j

by s1k3s 4y ago

I can't keep up with this stuff anymore. As a former "full stack" dev, I just quit the frontend part altogether and I'm now just focusing on the backend. It's just too much and changing too fast.

goodoldneon 4y ago
I agree that frontend stuff moves too fast in general, but Vite specifically is a good change. Frontend build systems are a mess (and often slow) so I welcome tools that improve the situation
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  It doesn't move fast. It creates a lot of noise fast. It's like having a chicken running around, but it gets nowhere
  - lhnz 4y ago
    The tool being discussed is literally significantly faster than predecessors.
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      > I agree that frontend stuff moves too fast in general
butz 4y ago
What technologies are you working with on backend? I'm pondering to abandon frontend too.
- s1k3s 4y ago
  Well, I'm employed as a software architect and we're currently using Spring and Symfony. Very different languages and very similar frameworks. In my free time I play around with Go and some NextJS stuff.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  .NET Core. Always pondering between Razor templates generated on the backend vs front-end templating frameworks.
pen2l 4y ago
Hear, hear. I'd been away from the scene and recently returned, backend historically was the greater challenge for me since I thought I had an eye for design and could whip up basic things using the more fundamental building blocks. I come back, and I can't tell one thing from the other. SPA, or server-side rendering? Will SPA get me dinged because crawlers can't deal with them? I don't know, I get a different answer from every next person! Angular and Vue were the thing last I was paying attention. Now React is the thing. But not so fast, there's Next.js. I think I've had enough, I will supplement my Django backend templates with handwritten CSS.
- kriberg 4y ago
  You can check out htmxhtmx and alpinejs, those complement django quite nicely and you dont have to go down the javascript rabithole to get some dynamicism.
jbverschoor 4y ago
It's too much of the same stuff. Similar frameworks, similar tooling. And they all suck. I think it has to do with frontend means designers/ux, and those people tend to like being in the spotlight and grab fame. Therefore it's logical that they just create / fork something instead of contributing to an existing project. This results in buggy projects because they try to do everything, and unmaintained after a while. Usually they're also less thought out than with backend projects.
skrebbel 4y ago
Our frontend is mostly class-based react components compiled with webpack 4 and babel 6 (for context: those are old versions). and guess what? it all just works. new 3rd party components also just work. adding modern hooks-based functional components just works. and everything that worked 5 years ago still just works. I think the JS our tooling emits is backward compatible with IE9 and up, which is ridiculous and wasteful and also no problem at all. just don't upgrade random tooling all the time and you're good. most widely used JS stuff has an excellent backward compat story. (react itself is amazing in this regard IMO) a corollary to this is that if you feel fatigued by having to constantly learn and upgrade your tooling, maybe you're just having regular old analysis paralysis and you're blaming the tooling for no good reason. just use the tools you already know and get going! you can build fantastic, modern-feeling software using only tools and knowledge from a decade ago.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  > just don't upgrade random tooling all the time and you're good. Good luck with that in the NPM ecosystem
  - piperswe 4y ago
    Why so?
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      If you care a little bit about those critical / major security vulnerability alerts, and are working with NPM professionally, I shouldn't need to answer the question. If you are not, it's because NPM moves very fast, you can lock in your dependencies but soon enough they'll start signaling vulnerabilities.
      - skrebbel 4y ago
        We check out all these reports but in 99% of the cases it's something like "if you pipe user data into to this command line tool, then it's hackable!!" and said tool only gets used by our build toolchain and not by runtime code, so no user code ever gets piped there. We've not yet run into a must-upgrade dependabot vuln that was also non-trivial to upgrade to because of the infamous (but, to our experience, untrue) NPM dependency hell story.
ThalesX 4y ago
I was just telling my friend yesterday that after a decade of full stack I just don't feel that I can do it anymore. Serverless, bundlers, frameworks, CI / CDs, virtual doms, non-virtual doms, semi-virtual doms, JSON responses, HTML responses, SSR, UI / UX... on and on and on. I have to go through documentation for at least 3 of these things and mush my brain until product decides that that feature is not worthwhile because it can't be done in 2 weeks.
- s1k3s 4y ago
  Exactly. My favorite part is how they discover stuff like "SSR" and "serverless" now, both being concepts as old as the web.
wishinghand 4y ago
Can't keep up with what? There's a few Javascript frameworks, and React is the lion's share of job postings. There's a few build tools but most everyone uses Webpack. The unit testing tools work on frontend and backend, and mostly seem to center around Mocha or Jest. There was a short lived explosion of frontend frameworks that grognards drag up like it's a relevant problem, but serving up HTML from a server side route has always been an option.
elforce002 4y ago
3yrs going fullstack and I feel your pain. I went with Nextjs with all its bells and whistles and expressjs (99% of cases is enough). Now I'm currently moving to MLE projects at work. I only pay attention to new tech only if here's a huge demand (ie. Plenty of Jobs and good $$$). Only then I start learning it. Nextjs/React won the frontend battle (atm). It's almost impossible to keep up + being specialist. Heck, it's equally difficult to be a generalist with new things coming up every 3/6 months.
rk06 4y ago
You don't need to keep up with this stuff. Just need to be aware that these tech exists and evaluate them when need arises. In many companies, you won't be tinkering with vite at all. The build person will do that, you will be reaping the benefits of it only.
- s1k3s 4y ago
  People back out of the hiring process because we don't use new stuff. This really is a problem for us atm.
  - rk06 4y ago
    People back out because you are not using new tools? Or because you are using old tools and are not willing to upgrade? Well, there are cobol devs for hire. So, tech alone is not sufficient to drive away all potential hires. There might be other red flags
ForSpareParts 4y ago
I really do believe this is getting better -- though not at a rate where it's obvious yet if you aren't plugged in. A few years ago there were tons of frameworks and they all worked a bit differently. New shit every week. IMO that's because no one had really figured out the right paradigm yet. Now we have (it's components) and the framework race has slowed way down (it's pretty much React, Vue, and Angular now). Even big changes in React like Hooks didn't break backwards compatibility. You can move pretty slow and steady on that front, if you want to. Tooling is the next frontier. It's become obvious that compiling js in js itself is just not performant enough for large applications. We need a faster solution. There are a few contenders right now (esbuild, swc, bun; vite wraps esbuild) but I suspect within two years we'll have a pretty clear winner. In general I think things move faster when we haven't found the right ideas yet, and that's why backend is more stable -- it's just older. There has been more time to iterate and figure out what works and what doesn't. Frontend will probably always be more chaotic than backend, but I think it'll be much less so as we start to agree on the web want it to look like.

by s1k3s 4y ago

I can't keep up with this stuff anymore. As a former "full stack" dev, I just quit the frontend part altogether and I'm now just focusing on the backend. It's just too much and changing too fast.

goodoldneon 4y ago

I agree that frontend stuff moves too fast in general, but Vite specifically is a good change. Frontend build systems are a mess (and often slow) so I welcome tools that improve the situation

jbverschoor 4y ago
It doesn't move fast. It creates a lot of noise fast. It's like having a chicken running around, but it gets nowhere
- lhnz 4y ago
  The tool being discussed is literally significantly faster than predecessors.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    > I agree that frontend stuff moves too fast in general

butz 4y ago

What technologies are you working with on backend? I'm pondering to abandon frontend too.

s1k3s 4y ago
Well, I'm employed as a software architect and we're currently using Spring and Symfony. Very different languages and very similar frameworks. In my free time I play around with Go and some NextJS stuff.
francisofascii 4y ago
.NET Core. Always pondering between Razor templates generated on the backend vs front-end templating frameworks.

pen2l 4y ago

Hear, hear. I'd been away from the scene and recently returned, backend historically was the greater challenge for me since I thought I had an eye for design and could whip up basic things using the more fundamental building blocks. I come back, and I can't tell one thing from the other. SPA, or server-side rendering? Will SPA get me dinged because crawlers can't deal with them? I don't know, I get a different answer from every next person! Angular and Vue were the thing last I was paying attention. Now React is the thing. But not so fast, there's Next.js. I think I've had enough, I will supplement my Django backend templates with handwritten CSS.

kriberg 4y ago
You can check out htmxhtmx and alpinejs, those complement django quite nicely and you dont have to go down the javascript rabithole to get some dynamicism.

jbverschoor 4y ago

It's too much of the same stuff. Similar frameworks, similar tooling. And they all suck. I think it has to do with frontend means designers/ux, and those people tend to like being in the spotlight and grab fame. Therefore it's logical that they just create / fork something instead of contributing to an existing project. This results in buggy projects because they try to do everything, and unmaintained after a while. Usually they're also less thought out than with backend projects.

skrebbel 4y ago

Our frontend is mostly class-based react components compiled with webpack 4 and babel 6 (for context: those are old versions). and guess what? it all just works. new 3rd party components also just work. adding modern hooks-based functional components just works. and everything that worked 5 years ago still just works. I think the JS our tooling emits is backward compatible with IE9 and up, which is ridiculous and wasteful and also no problem at all. just don't upgrade random tooling all the time and you're good. most widely used JS stuff has an excellent backward compat story. (react itself is amazing in this regard IMO) a corollary to this is that if you feel fatigued by having to constantly learn and upgrade your tooling, maybe you're just having regular old analysis paralysis and you're blaming the tooling for no good reason. just use the tools you already know and get going! you can build fantastic, modern-feeling software using only tools and knowledge from a decade ago.

ThalesX 4y ago
> just don't upgrade random tooling all the time and you're good. Good luck with that in the NPM ecosystem
- piperswe 4y ago
  Why so?
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    If you care a little bit about those critical / major security vulnerability alerts, and are working with NPM professionally, I shouldn't need to answer the question. If you are not, it's because NPM moves very fast, you can lock in your dependencies but soon enough they'll start signaling vulnerabilities.
    - skrebbel 4y ago
      We check out all these reports but in 99% of the cases it's something like "if you pipe user data into to this command line tool, then it's hackable!!" and said tool only gets used by our build toolchain and not by runtime code, so no user code ever gets piped there. We've not yet run into a must-upgrade dependabot vuln that was also non-trivial to upgrade to because of the infamous (but, to our experience, untrue) NPM dependency hell story.

ThalesX 4y ago

I was just telling my friend yesterday that after a decade of full stack I just don't feel that I can do it anymore. Serverless, bundlers, frameworks, CI / CDs, virtual doms, non-virtual doms, semi-virtual doms, JSON responses, HTML responses, SSR, UI / UX... on and on and on. I have to go through documentation for at least 3 of these things and mush my brain until product decides that that feature is not worthwhile because it can't be done in 2 weeks.

s1k3s 4y ago
Exactly. My favorite part is how they discover stuff like "SSR" and "serverless" now, both being concepts as old as the web.

wishinghand 4y ago

Can't keep up with what? There's a few Javascript frameworks, and React is the lion's share of job postings. There's a few build tools but most everyone uses Webpack. The unit testing tools work on frontend and backend, and mostly seem to center around Mocha or Jest. There was a short lived explosion of frontend frameworks that grognards drag up like it's a relevant problem, but serving up HTML from a server side route has always been an option.

elforce002 4y ago

3yrs going fullstack and I feel your pain. I went with Nextjs with all its bells and whistles and expressjs (99% of cases is enough). Now I'm currently moving to MLE projects at work. I only pay attention to new tech only if here's a huge demand (ie. Plenty of Jobs and good $$$). Only then I start learning it. Nextjs/React won the frontend battle (atm). It's almost impossible to keep up + being specialist. Heck, it's equally difficult to be a generalist with new things coming up every 3/6 months.

rk06 4y ago

You don't need to keep up with this stuff. Just need to be aware that these tech exists and evaluate them when need arises. In many companies, you won't be tinkering with vite at all. The build person will do that, you will be reaping the benefits of it only.

s1k3s 4y ago
People back out of the hiring process because we don't use new stuff. This really is a problem for us atm.
- rk06 4y ago
  People back out because you are not using new tools? Or because you are using old tools and are not willing to upgrade? Well, there are cobol devs for hire. So, tech alone is not sufficient to drive away all potential hires. There might be other red flags

ForSpareParts 4y ago

I really do believe this is getting better -- though not at a rate where it's obvious yet if you aren't plugged in. A few years ago there were tons of frameworks and they all worked a bit differently. New shit every week. IMO that's because no one had really figured out the right paradigm yet. Now we have (it's components) and the framework race has slowed way down (it's pretty much React, Vue, and Angular now). Even big changes in React like Hooks didn't break backwards compatibility. You can move pretty slow and steady on that front, if you want to. Tooling is the next frontier. It's become obvious that compiling js in js itself is just not performant enough for large applications. We need a faster solution. There are a few contenders right now (esbuild, swc, bun; vite wraps esbuild) but I suspect within two years we'll have a pretty clear winner. In general I think things move faster when we haven't found the right ideas yet, and that's why backend is more stable -- it's just older. There has been more time to iterate and figure out what works and what doesn't. Frontend will probably always be more chaotic than backend, but I think it'll be much less so as we start to agree on the web want it to look like.