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Without fail, every article from Kent C. Dodds shows what appears to be total inexperience despite claims of the contrary. The advice is, at this point, almost

Without fail, every article from Kent C. Dodds shows what appears to be total inexperience despite claims of the contrary. The advice is, at this point, almost meme worthy. There's an infamous post from 2021 (that he may have been roasted for here): https://kentcdodds.com/blog/how-i-built-a-modern-website-in-2021 https://kentcdodds.com/blog/how-i-built-a-modern-website-in-... Almost every single piece of advice is wildly overcomplicated and ridiculous. I do like some of the technologies proposed, but you can host this stuff on a single VM without any of the fancy frameworks, tools, or hosting options. Kent is the only blogger that I've felt compelled to tell all my less experienced colleagues to completely ignore, and I feel entirely justified doing so whenever they bring him up. The proliferation of his perspective has, quite literally, been a pain in my ass daily trying to re-teach misguided fundamentals. I really don't understand who the intended audience is. The expert beginner, maybe? I'm sure he's probably a wonderful human being, however.

rufius 3y ago
I agree. The article reads like satire. I can’t tell if he’s making fun of the hoops you have to jump through to make a “modern web app”.
- MentallyRetired 3y ago
  I also agree. I thought it was a joke. Once I got to the logos I was sure it was a joke.
djfobbz 3y ago
His article is the epic antithesis of the KISS principle. Imagine being a beginner wanting to get into web app development and then finding out that the most "Epic Stack" requires you to learn 26 different pieces of technology, each with its own millions of nuances. SMH!
ponyous 3y ago
What advice is meme worthy? Can you be more specific? You are just saying it's not good, that you would not advise to follow him, etc... > The proliferation of his perspective has, quite literally, been a pain in my ass daily trying to re-teach misguided fundamentals Again can you give an example? I feel like he gives sound advice, but I just recently discovered him.
- belmont_sup 3y ago
  For those that are using open source js software to build web applications and are able to pick apart and understand what each tool does, his choice of tools are actually tried and true. Even a C# developer building with aspnet has to reach out to many of these tools: grafana, some hosting service, some log/error monitoring tool. But at the same time, I think a lot of comments here are pointing at the glaring reminder of how obscenely complex development for the web can be in the JS ecosystem (for new or non-js devs). Why point new engs to remix, prisma, mailgun, insert 3rd party tool when it’s so much better to give them the Ruby on Rails approach? Aspnet, Ruby on Rails, and similar frameworks in all languages including JS frameworks incorporate nearly all the tools mentioned but without requiring someone to wire it up themselves (or to understand the wiring).
  - ponyous 3y ago
    > But at the same time, I think a lot of comments here are pointing at the glaring reminder of how obscenely complex development for the web can be in the JS ecosystem Absolutely agree, this has nothing to do with Kent. > but without requiring someone to wire it up themselves That's the whole point of the stack - that you don't need to wire all of that tech yourself.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  For one, Remix, actually. If you're "just trying to ship", the recommendation should probably be Rails, Django, or Next.js at this point. Flavour of the month technology is cool, but it's not mature enough to put in the "just ship it category." His preferences are always bleeding edge, hip things. And that's not the kind of stuff you build on when you want to buck up and ship an idea. It might be good stuff, but using what you know and what is stable is the only choice when you're trying to get things done. SQLite, yes. LiteFS on fly.io? Why? Just run bloody SQLite on a server and get it over with. He historically caters to a beginner crowd, but totally skips fundamentals - then we all get know-it-alls that we have to bring back down to reality. It's not so much the technology he likes, but the way he pitches it is extremely problematic. He pitches niche, complicated stuff and tries to pass it off as basics. No thank you.
Paul-Craft 3y ago
He was, indeed, fairly well roasted for it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28818829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28818829
norman784 3y ago
But the whole modern development it's a nightmare as I see, or at least the advertised modern serverless development, you need to depend on: - Some serverless hosting - Some database provider - Some auth provider - Some other service, etc In the past you just rented a simple VPS or shared hosting, setup all by yourself and have just one provider for everything, nowadays I read that auth it's very hard and you should not do it and instead use some auth provider (Auth0, etc). I remember the good old days with php, just upload your file and it worked, now they try to replicate that experience but with dozens of providers.
- fabian2k 3y ago
  The non-serverless version still works fine, even in modern JS land. The simple approach still works if you have some knowledge around setting up a server and configuring a few things. I also think that the advice around Authentication is often misguided. For simple cases it's not that hard to add authentication without a separate service. There is too much scaring the newbies around that topic, when they are probably about as likely to mess up authentication when they try to configure an excessively complex library compared to implementing basic session authentication with the tools their framework provides.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  Even in the good old days you still had a database provider (often PHP plus MySQL in the classic LAMP stack) and in some cases an Auth provider (especially if you consider classic tools like Wordpress and Drupal as Auth providers). (Relatedly, the advice about Auth is best "don't roll your own auth" and that doesn't mean that you have to use an Auth provider, but at least use a library vetted by others. I also tend to add "don't keep passwords in your database" because that is a [legal/accounting] liability issue [more than being "hard", though it can seem hard to do right], which does make it good advice to find a third-party Auth provider you trust if you must support password-based workflows. Luckily some new options and libraries for password-less Auth are becoming slowly more common.) The great big irony here is just that "serverless hosting" is just an extremely silly new name for "shared hosting". The basic economics are the same: instead of paying for a whole server, pay for what you use, then share the remaining resources with other sites. The new serverless hosts aren't just trying to replicate the "good old days" experience, in some cases they've inherited it. They've also just had the bad luck of hindsight from past shared hosting model problems: insecure FTP is dead (so there's much less of a feeling of "just copy the files over"), allowing direct crontab editing is known to be dangerous in shared hosts so serverless options need their own (often extremely custom) timed kickoff DSLs, hosting static files and application files in the same place is known to cause accidents so there's a greater separation in static hosting and serverless applications, and so forth. A lot of those same complications happened to a lot of the "classic" shared hosts, too. (Which is why many of those entrenched to specialize in known applications over time, cPanel anything you want as long as it is Wordpress or Drupal or one of the other six blog apps the host vetted. The disappearance of "shared hosting" wasn't just that modern development got complicated but that modern shared machine security got harder.)
jatins 3y ago
I was convinced that he was going to sell this "Stack" for an exorbitant amount like some other Javascript influencers have done in the past. Thankfully this seems to be free at least.
- eatonphil 3y ago
  I think you still have to be careful about folks selling training courses (or consulting services) to make sure that they aren't also glorifying complexity, even if they aren't trying to sell a product (or library or framework).
  - shados 3y ago
    "You're wrong about the way you do unit test! Everything everyone is telling you is wrong! Fortunately, you can get my course that will clarify everything I just confused you about!!"
    - azemetre 3y ago
      While I love testing-library, and have contributed to the sister libraries, one thing that always irked me is there was no empirical proof on why it was just better outside of handy wavy "because I said so."
- 0xblinq 3y ago
  Well, the more complex he makes things the more courses and consulting he’ll sell. It’s just marketing and his business model.
Socrates21 3y ago
[flagged]
shados 3y ago
It's not just him and is more of a general issue with frontend "thought leadership". Most of them went into it when they were relatively early in their career. There's no 1:1 relationship between years of experience and skill/knowledge of course, but if you pick any random FE influencer on Twitter, chances are they have less experience in the field than the staff engineer in your team. Unfortunately, it shows. They do have a lot of good advice, and I don't want to throw the baby with the bathwater. But they do get it wrong pretty often, and it does waste hundreds or thousands of hours having to go internally in an engineering org telling people "No, it's not because you read it on the internet that it's true". A much older equivalent example was how back in the days in the Microsoft world everyone would say you HAD to use stored procedures for performance and security, ignoring prepared statements, so a lot of big companies had internal onboarding classes that always started with debunking it. Kent added a ton of confusion and did a lot of disservice to the unit testing space (the library is good, the philosophy lacks a lot of nuance), some other folks are creating a lot of chaos around SPAs/client vs SSR (they started adding nuance to that more recently), and so on and so forth. It's part of why the JS ecosystem keeps restarting from scratch over and over instead of building on top and creating vertical innovation. We get there eventually, but it's so much slower than it needs to be.
vinclou 3y ago
Why do yall suppose this for beginners? You can judge the tooling choice, but kek you ‘ll either pick the tools that’s given or make up ur own “stack”
0xblinq 3y ago
Totally agree on this. If you look at him as a marketing person trying to sell you something instead of as a developer, it all makes sense.

rufius 3y ago

I agree. The article reads like satire. I can’t tell if he’s making fun of the hoops you have to jump through to make a “modern web app”.

MentallyRetired 3y ago
I also agree. I thought it was a joke. Once I got to the logos I was sure it was a joke.

djfobbz 3y ago

His article is the epic antithesis of the KISS principle. Imagine being a beginner wanting to get into web app development and then finding out that the most "Epic Stack" requires you to learn 26 different pieces of technology, each with its own millions of nuances. SMH!

ponyous 3y ago

What advice is meme worthy? Can you be more specific? You are just saying it's not good, that you would not advise to follow him, etc... > The proliferation of his perspective has, quite literally, been a pain in my ass daily trying to re-teach misguided fundamentals Again can you give an example? I feel like he gives sound advice, but I just recently discovered him.

belmont_sup 3y ago
For those that are using open source js software to build web applications and are able to pick apart and understand what each tool does, his choice of tools are actually tried and true. Even a C# developer building with aspnet has to reach out to many of these tools: grafana, some hosting service, some log/error monitoring tool. But at the same time, I think a lot of comments here are pointing at the glaring reminder of how obscenely complex development for the web can be in the JS ecosystem (for new or non-js devs). Why point new engs to remix, prisma, mailgun, insert 3rd party tool when it’s so much better to give them the Ruby on Rails approach? Aspnet, Ruby on Rails, and similar frameworks in all languages including JS frameworks incorporate nearly all the tools mentioned but without requiring someone to wire it up themselves (or to understand the wiring).
- ponyous 3y ago
  > But at the same time, I think a lot of comments here are pointing at the glaring reminder of how obscenely complex development for the web can be in the JS ecosystem Absolutely agree, this has nothing to do with Kent. > but without requiring someone to wire it up themselves That's the whole point of the stack - that you don't need to wire all of that tech yourself.
lucasyvas 3y ago
For one, Remix, actually. If you're "just trying to ship", the recommendation should probably be Rails, Django, or Next.js at this point. Flavour of the month technology is cool, but it's not mature enough to put in the "just ship it category." His preferences are always bleeding edge, hip things. And that's not the kind of stuff you build on when you want to buck up and ship an idea. It might be good stuff, but using what you know and what is stable is the only choice when you're trying to get things done. SQLite, yes. LiteFS on fly.io? Why? Just run bloody SQLite on a server and get it over with. He historically caters to a beginner crowd, but totally skips fundamentals - then we all get know-it-alls that we have to bring back down to reality. It's not so much the technology he likes, but the way he pitches it is extremely problematic. He pitches niche, complicated stuff and tries to pass it off as basics. No thank you.

Paul-Craft 3y ago

He was, indeed, fairly well roasted for it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28818829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28818829

norman784 3y ago

But the whole modern development it's a nightmare as I see, or at least the advertised modern serverless development, you need to depend on: - Some serverless hosting - Some database provider - Some auth provider - Some other service, etc In the past you just rented a simple VPS or shared hosting, setup all by yourself and have just one provider for everything, nowadays I read that auth it's very hard and you should not do it and instead use some auth provider (Auth0, etc). I remember the good old days with php, just upload your file and it worked, now they try to replicate that experience but with dozens of providers.

fabian2k 3y ago
The non-serverless version still works fine, even in modern JS land. The simple approach still works if you have some knowledge around setting up a server and configuring a few things. I also think that the advice around Authentication is often misguided. For simple cases it's not that hard to add authentication without a separate service. There is too much scaring the newbies around that topic, when they are probably about as likely to mess up authentication when they try to configure an excessively complex library compared to implementing basic session authentication with the tools their framework provides.
WorldMaker 3y ago
Even in the good old days you still had a database provider (often PHP plus MySQL in the classic LAMP stack) and in some cases an Auth provider (especially if you consider classic tools like Wordpress and Drupal as Auth providers). (Relatedly, the advice about Auth is best "don't roll your own auth" and that doesn't mean that you have to use an Auth provider, but at least use a library vetted by others. I also tend to add "don't keep passwords in your database" because that is a [legal/accounting] liability issue [more than being "hard", though it can seem hard to do right], which does make it good advice to find a third-party Auth provider you trust if you must support password-based workflows. Luckily some new options and libraries for password-less Auth are becoming slowly more common.) The great big irony here is just that "serverless hosting" is just an extremely silly new name for "shared hosting". The basic economics are the same: instead of paying for a whole server, pay for what you use, then share the remaining resources with other sites. The new serverless hosts aren't just trying to replicate the "good old days" experience, in some cases they've inherited it. They've also just had the bad luck of hindsight from past shared hosting model problems: insecure FTP is dead (so there's much less of a feeling of "just copy the files over"), allowing direct crontab editing is known to be dangerous in shared hosts so serverless options need their own (often extremely custom) timed kickoff DSLs, hosting static files and application files in the same place is known to cause accidents so there's a greater separation in static hosting and serverless applications, and so forth. A lot of those same complications happened to a lot of the "classic" shared hosts, too. (Which is why many of those entrenched to specialize in known applications over time, cPanel anything you want as long as it is Wordpress or Drupal or one of the other six blog apps the host vetted. The disappearance of "shared hosting" wasn't just that modern development got complicated but that modern shared machine security got harder.)

jatins 3y ago

I was convinced that he was going to sell this "Stack" for an exorbitant amount like some other Javascript influencers have done in the past. Thankfully this seems to be free at least.

eatonphil 3y ago
I think you still have to be careful about folks selling training courses (or consulting services) to make sure that they aren't also glorifying complexity, even if they aren't trying to sell a product (or library or framework).
- shados 3y ago
  "You're wrong about the way you do unit test! Everything everyone is telling you is wrong! Fortunately, you can get my course that will clarify everything I just confused you about!!"
  - azemetre 3y ago
    While I love testing-library, and have contributed to the sister libraries, one thing that always irked me is there was no empirical proof on why it was just better outside of handy wavy "because I said so."
0xblinq 3y ago
Well, the more complex he makes things the more courses and consulting he’ll sell. It’s just marketing and his business model.

Socrates21 3y ago

[flagged]

shados 3y ago

It's not just him and is more of a general issue with frontend "thought leadership". Most of them went into it when they were relatively early in their career. There's no 1:1 relationship between years of experience and skill/knowledge of course, but if you pick any random FE influencer on Twitter, chances are they have less experience in the field than the staff engineer in your team. Unfortunately, it shows. They do have a lot of good advice, and I don't want to throw the baby with the bathwater. But they do get it wrong pretty often, and it does waste hundreds or thousands of hours having to go internally in an engineering org telling people "No, it's not because you read it on the internet that it's true". A much older equivalent example was how back in the days in the Microsoft world everyone would say you HAD to use stored procedures for performance and security, ignoring prepared statements, so a lot of big companies had internal onboarding classes that always started with debunking it. Kent added a ton of confusion and did a lot of disservice to the unit testing space (the library is good, the philosophy lacks a lot of nuance), some other folks are creating a lot of chaos around SPAs/client vs SSR (they started adding nuance to that more recently), and so on and so forth. It's part of why the JS ecosystem keeps restarting from scratch over and over instead of building on top and creating vertical innovation. We get there eventually, but it's so much slower than it needs to be.

vinclou 3y ago

Why do yall suppose this for beginners? You can judge the tooling choice, but kek you ‘ll either pick the tools that’s given or make up ur own “stack”

0xblinq 3y ago

Totally agree on this. If you look at him as a marketing person trying to sell you something instead of as a developer, it all makes sense.