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This. I hope you write your blogpost - I don't actually fully agree with your post entirely but my differings are only in the detail, the general thrust is rig

This. I hope you write your blogpost - I don't actually fully agree with your post entirely but my differings are only in the detail, the general thrust is right on point. > many of the tasks he describes in this post would cease to exist entirely if we began focusing on implementing things directly into specs and aggressively sunsetting the use of frameworks and tooling Nitpick: If you look at the tasks he describes one-by-one, this isn't really true as they're mostly spec/implementation domain/sdlc/ related, rather than framework/tooling apis. However... while he makes the list sound as complicated and insurmountable as possible, it isn't. These are mostly tasks I know how to do. And most are reasonably easy to know how to do. The problem is that FE devs don't learn these things, they expend their time gaining other much less portable / long-lasting knowledge (related to frameworks & tooling). The other sleight of hand the author pulls is listing way more tasks than one would ever have to do on one product or team - quite a few of them are niche insofar as most devs would leverage an abstraction library to provide them with generic versions of these features; building from first-principles would be a rarer special-case for narrowly domain-focused product teams.

dimmke 4y ago
>while he makes the list sound as complicated and insurmountable as possible, it isn't. This is a really great point, and ties into what I was saying. I made the transition when I had to. I am not a genius/wunderkind. I just sucked it up and did it. I have a hypothesis about this, actually. JavaScript used to really suck. Like, people don't even know who weren't around in the 2000s. It was not at all the language it is today. And there was no StackOverflow or Github or MDN with perfect documentation or coding bootcamps or Udemy courses or any of the other numerous resources on learning how to code. Your options were W3Schools and posting questions on the #javascript channel in Freenode IRC. I think a lot of people doing front-end development simply decided they just couldn't do "real" programming because the resources weren't there to assist them and they didn't have a normal CS background. I definitely had that idea in my head for a long time. The people who were decent at writing JavaScript in the 2000s were software engineers with computer science degrees who probably mostly wrote Java. And they were doing it holding their noses. When you look at people that had such an immense impact on how the look and feel of websites developed, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Chris Coyier. Those were just guys. They weren't software engineers. But they are hugely important figures that I worry will eventually be lost to time. He wants the other skills to be as highly valued as the programming skills - but they just aren't. You aren't going to get paid $250k a year to tighten up sloppy CSS. That CSS is probably CSS-in-JS shit anyways with a framework added to it like Tailwind. A lot of companies probably don't even realize what they lost in this transition. They perhaps weren't even cognizant of it happening. >I hope you write your blogpost Oh, it's for sure happening. I've sunk too much time into it. However, I'm going into extreme detail in several areas. It's more of a manifesto/conceptual framework I guess so it's taking a long time to put together.

dimmke 4y ago

>while he makes the list sound as complicated and insurmountable as possible, it isn't. This is a really great point, and ties into what I was saying. I made the transition when I had to. I am not a genius/wunderkind. I just sucked it up and did it. I have a hypothesis about this, actually. JavaScript used to really suck. Like, people don't even know who weren't around in the 2000s. It was not at all the language it is today. And there was no StackOverflow or Github or MDN with perfect documentation or coding bootcamps or Udemy courses or any of the other numerous resources on learning how to code. Your options were W3Schools and posting questions on the #javascript channel in Freenode IRC. I think a lot of people doing front-end development simply decided they just couldn't do "real" programming because the resources weren't there to assist them and they didn't have a normal CS background. I definitely had that idea in my head for a long time. The people who were decent at writing JavaScript in the 2000s were software engineers with computer science degrees who probably mostly wrote Java. And they were doing it holding their noses. When you look at people that had such an immense impact on how the look and feel of websites developed, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Chris Coyier. Those were just guys. They weren't software engineers. But they are hugely important figures that I worry will eventually be lost to time. He wants the other skills to be as highly valued as the programming skills - but they just aren't. You aren't going to get paid $250k a year to tighten up sloppy CSS. That CSS is probably CSS-in-JS shit anyways with a framework added to it like Tailwind. A lot of companies probably don't even realize what they lost in this transition. They perhaps weren't even cognizant of it happening. >I hope you write your blogpost Oh, it's for sure happening. I've sunk too much time into it. However, I'm going into extreme detail in several areas. It's more of a manifesto/conceptual framework I guess so it's taking a long time to put together.