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My perennial problem with frontend work is that all the articles are written for an audience of people who have been keeping up with the state of the art for th

My perennial problem with frontend work is that all the articles are written for an audience of people who have been keeping up with the state of the art for the last 15 years. The first time I wrote actual frontend things in exchange for USD, I was generating "DHTML" (my fingers stumbled over even typing the abbreviation because it's flushed so far out of my muscle memory cache) directly from perl. I know frontend stuff like a six year old knows calculus, and I feel like there's no way for me to catch up now.

dragonwriter 3y ago
There's a whole lot of frontend content written for complete newbies, as well as stuff written for people who have been keeping up; if you are an experienced programmer who hasn't been keeping up with frontend stuff, you'll probably need to use a mix of stuff written for people with less programming experience than you have and stuff written for people with more frontend experience, but catching up isn't making up for the intervening time you weren't engaged, because while a tiny fraction of the knowledge of frameworks that has come and gone went into shaping context for the "always current" people learning the new stuff, a large fraction of it is just knowledge that is no longer relevant.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
Search for the blog posts “X for Dinosaurs.” Already getting old but will get you up to 2018.
SJC_Hacker 3y ago
The big shift has been to Single Page Applications (SPA) either indirectly using a framekwork like React, or Angular or using the Javascript fetch() directly. So this also means that links (within your website/application) go away. This avoids page reloads, and it feels more like a desktop application. The foundation is modern Javascript, another big new concept is async/await, combined with the fetch() calls so the entire screen doesn't lock up while your'e waiting for it to return The other big shift is using CSS framekworks. Big ones now are Bootstrap and Tailwind. I'm actually working on making a video with a live coding experiment making a small social networking site with some modern practices. But some people still persist in doing the old way - e.g. Wikipedia. And Hacker News isn't an SPA from what I understand Also, the "old way" has started to make a comeback with Server Side Rendering, as the compiled Javascript files using frameworks can get up to several megabytes and its taking too long to load the site.
nsinreal 3y ago
There are so much changes for the last 15 years. You don't need to learn all that path. You need to learn modern web development from scratch, ignoring history. Right now, modern web development is: - Yarn/PNPM as package manager - TypeScript as a programming language - React as UI framework/library - React Router for navigating multiple pages - UI kit (I personally have good experience with React Material UI - https://mui.com/ https://mui.com/; there is also https://tanstack.com/ https://tanstack.com/) - Something to deal with fetching data (tanstack query client is cool, provides caching out of the box) - Something to deal with forms if you have that - Maybe a store for managing data when it's too complex (see https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createSlice https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createSlice) - And ofc, there are some templates/frameworks that bring something of that together (https://create-react-app.dev/ https://create-react-app.dev/; maybe https://vitejs.dev/ https://vitejs.dev/) - google for templates. I recommend finding some friend with modern experience or at least some youtube tutorials or at least some learning course. That would help you to catch up on the best way to bootstrap your first project. Then you can practice.

dragonwriter 3y ago

There's a whole lot of frontend content written for complete newbies, as well as stuff written for people who have been keeping up; if you are an experienced programmer who hasn't been keeping up with frontend stuff, you'll probably need to use a mix of stuff written for people with less programming experience than you have and stuff written for people with more frontend experience, but catching up isn't making up for the intervening time you weren't engaged, because while a tiny fraction of the knowledge of frameworks that has come and gone went into shaping context for the "always current" people learning the new stuff, a large fraction of it is just knowledge that is no longer relevant.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

Search for the blog posts “X for Dinosaurs.” Already getting old but will get you up to 2018.

SJC_Hacker 3y ago

The big shift has been to Single Page Applications (SPA) either indirectly using a framekwork like React, or Angular or using the Javascript fetch() directly. So this also means that links (within your website/application) go away. This avoids page reloads, and it feels more like a desktop application. The foundation is modern Javascript, another big new concept is async/await, combined with the fetch() calls so the entire screen doesn't lock up while your'e waiting for it to return The other big shift is using CSS framekworks. Big ones now are Bootstrap and Tailwind. I'm actually working on making a video with a live coding experiment making a small social networking site with some modern practices. But some people still persist in doing the old way - e.g. Wikipedia. And Hacker News isn't an SPA from what I understand Also, the "old way" has started to make a comeback with Server Side Rendering, as the compiled Javascript files using frameworks can get up to several megabytes and its taking too long to load the site.

nsinreal 3y ago

There are so much changes for the last 15 years. You don't need to learn all that path. You need to learn modern web development from scratch, ignoring history. Right now, modern web development is: - Yarn/PNPM as package manager - TypeScript as a programming language - React as UI framework/library - React Router for navigating multiple pages - UI kit (I personally have good experience with React Material UI - https://mui.com/ https://mui.com/; there is also https://tanstack.com/ https://tanstack.com/) - Something to deal with fetching data (tanstack query client is cool, provides caching out of the box) - Something to deal with forms if you have that - Maybe a store for managing data when it's too complex (see https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createSlice https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createSlice) - And ofc, there are some templates/frameworks that bring something of that together (https://create-react-app.dev/ https://create-react-app.dev/; maybe https://vitejs.dev/ https://vitejs.dev/) - google for templates. I recommend finding some friend with modern experience or at least some youtube tutorials or at least some learning course. That would help you to catch up on the best way to bootstrap your first project. Then you can practice.