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Front end is a young person’s game because of the endless churn. It’s where I started and I love delivering a tight, next-level UX. But I’ve spent the last deca
by richardw 2y ago
Front end is a young person’s game because of the endless churn. It’s where I started and I love delivering a tight, next-level UX. But I’ve spent the last decade in enterprise distributed, microservices, integration, data etc with a ton of complexity but far less BS churn. Now I need to decide on a web stack and have been leaning TS, React, Next etc. But there’s no foundation you can rely on. It’s shifting as we speak, with the endless gyrations and new abstractions, and waves of complexity and simplification and breaking changes. I’ve never minded learning but in front end you basically zero your knowledge every few years. This is now an area I’ll happily delegate to an AI.
Of course I’m heavily into LLM’s etc right now so maybe I should stop whining. That makes JS seem like a glacier.
- o_m 2y agoI have quit the React/Node/JavaScript ecosystem. I'm going all in on backend. I also feel all the time invested in front end has always wither and vanish. It is hard to accumulate knowledge in the front end field when it is always changing. I'm probably going to lose money on this bet (going from senior front end), but I'm already feeling a lot happier.
- lakomen 2y agoBut that's so ugh. Templates and the endless helper functions. No interactivity, all the if else blocks. No just no, not again.
- lakomen 2y agoRust, I've been experimenting with it, and (tutorial) code written a year ago doesn't compile anymore. If there's something you shouldn't use, it's Rust, at least for the time being. Maybe in 10 years.
- whytevuhuni 2y agoThat should definitely not be the case. Did you compile it with a different edition, or different 3rd party dependency major versions, perhaps?
- richardw 2y agoThanks for the warning! I’ve been meaning to check it out.
- satvikpendem 2y agoIf there's anything Rust takes seriously, it's backward compatibility, so something is definitely wrong with the parent commenter's situation, the code should compile as Rust explicitly lists as one of its main goals the ability to compile code from any Rust version, indefinitely.
- adverbly 2y agoNo foundation? What do you think all these libraries and frameworks are built on??? The true path to having a "deep" front-end toolbox is in learning things that are not libraries. Here is a "long-lasting" frontend list that really just scratches the surface: - CSS(animations, advanced layouts etc...) - HTML(canvas, accessibility, svgs...) - websockets, advanced networking - advanced browser APIs(indexdb, mouse/touch events, events in general, WebGL...) - high performance js, perf monitoring Its really just DOM/state manipulation, and different levels of caching that frameworks provide.
- richardw 2y agoI take your point but keeping an app current enough to maintain the ability to hire, is hardest in this area. Not like SQL or C for example. Knowing that can be useful for decades. You build knowledge that persists - experience is a good thing. I can’t tell you the front end stuff I’ve not used in a long time because the list is very long. Much of that knowledge isn’t useful and the code has long changed. I can get involved but I’m not as interested. It’s like in a war when the new guy shows up. Don’t get too friendly; he’s probably not going to make it.
- ivanjermakov 2y agoSolidJS[1] took the best from React and seems to be quite stable, check it out. It is fairly small and doesn't try to be everything at once. [1]: https://www.solidjs.com/ https://www.solidjs.com/