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This brought me flashbacks of jQuery spaghetti monsters from years ago, some were Backbone related. In retrospect, over-engineered React code can be worse than

This brought me flashbacks of jQuery spaghetti monsters from years ago, some were Backbone related. In retrospect, over-engineered React code can be worse than decently organized jQuery code, but some jQuery mess was worse than any React code. So I guess I'm saying, React did raise the bar and standard of quality - but it can get to be too much, sometimes a judicious use of old familiar tool gets the job done.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Sammi 9mo ago
I hear you saying that React raised the floor but also lowered the ceiling.
epolanski 9mo ago
You reminded me of a time where one of my clients asked me to add a feature on a file uploader written in react/redux. This was early 2021. I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways, the form literally had a textual input, a button to open the file explorer and a submit button. It took few weeks one of their Romanian team to build it and apparently that team was reassigned and nobody could touch it without them. I remember writing pages and pages of notes to understand how this all tied up in those extremely complex chains and claiming progress after few hours when I achieved to simplify the flow by removing a handful of these actions. Hooray. Then it suddenly dawned on me that...I could just rewrite it from scratch. Nuked the entirety of that nonsense and replaced it with a single useState in a matter of few hours also implemented the newly requested features. The client could not believe my progress and the fact I also removed many of their previous issues. Then I had a second realization: React was useless too and it got dropped for native HTML forms and a handful of JS callbacks.
- normie3000 9mo ago
  > I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways I 100% believe this, as it describes all the redux codebases I've seen. The library seems to be an antipattern of indirection.
  - Capricorn2481 9mo ago
    I really can't understand how someone would make 30 redux actions for a simple use case, as someone has implemented the exact same thing. But yes, not a fan of Redux myself
    - loglog 9mo ago
      Have some pity for those Senior Expert Architect Full-Stack Developers (fresh out of boot camp) in urgent need of job security.
      - epolanski 9mo ago
        The original developers weren't bootcampers but engineering graduates. And in the same way faang is filled with leetcode blackbelt charlatans writing slop, so is Romania apparently.
        namtab00 9mo ago
        Great generalization of an entire country's sector workforce. I'm sure you'd 100% approve of such a statement of your country when based on one anecdotal recount (even if it true).
        epolanski 9mo ago
        It's not about Romania or any other country. I was making a point that whether you graduate or not has little correlation with your capacity of handling higher abstractions and complexity, because neither bootcampers nor engineering graduates have the experience of building complex systems, let alone under time, tech leadership and management pressure. It is likely that the original authors may have found themselves in a situation where they were tasked to build a trivial form with technologies they were not accustomed to at the request of some superior and they ended writing a soup.
    - gloryjulio 9mo ago
      Many years ago, I used Redux to build real time streaming data processing layer. Basically I need to receive, merge, and process multiple data streams into a single realtime data pool. After that,consuming the realtime data becomes dead easy. Even now I am not sure I could find a better tool to deal with real time data and synchronization. But for simple crud Redux is mostly overkill
TuringNYC 9mo ago
>> This brought me flashbacks of jQuery spaghetti monsters from years ago, some were Backbone related. To be fair, jQuery was a response to the the IE and JS variant mess of the early 2000s. jQuery made development possible without debugging across three browser varients.
- ompogUe 9mo ago
  Standardized selectors was the big use case for me
root_axis 9mo ago
React made complex interactive UIs a lot easier to manage than jQuery, but that resulted in many developers adding a lot more complexity just because they could.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Sammi 9mo ago

I hear you saying that React raised the floor but also lowered the ceiling.

epolanski 9mo ago

You reminded me of a time where one of my clients asked me to add a feature on a file uploader written in react/redux. This was early 2021. I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways, the form literally had a textual input, a button to open the file explorer and a submit button. It took few weeks one of their Romanian team to build it and apparently that team was reassigned and nobody could touch it without them. I remember writing pages and pages of notes to understand how this all tied up in those extremely complex chains and claiming progress after few hours when I achieved to simplify the flow by removing a handful of these actions. Hooray. Then it suddenly dawned on me that...I could just rewrite it from scratch. Nuked the entirety of that nonsense and replaced it with a single useState in a matter of few hours also implemented the newly requested features. The client could not believe my progress and the fact I also removed many of their previous issues. Then I had a second realization: React was useless too and it got dropped for native HTML forms and a handful of JS callbacks.

normie3000 9mo ago
> I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways I 100% believe this, as it describes all the redux codebases I've seen. The library seems to be an antipattern of indirection.
- Capricorn2481 9mo ago
  I really can't understand how someone would make 30 redux actions for a simple use case, as someone has implemented the exact same thing. But yes, not a fan of Redux myself
  - loglog 9mo ago
    Have some pity for those Senior Expert Architect Full-Stack Developers (fresh out of boot camp) in urgent need of job security.
    - epolanski 9mo ago
      The original developers weren't bootcampers but engineering graduates. And in the same way faang is filled with leetcode blackbelt charlatans writing slop, so is Romania apparently.
      - namtab00 9mo ago
        Great generalization of an entire country's sector workforce. I'm sure you'd 100% approve of such a statement of your country when based on one anecdotal recount (even if it true).
        epolanski 9mo ago
        It's not about Romania or any other country. I was making a point that whether you graduate or not has little correlation with your capacity of handling higher abstractions and complexity, because neither bootcampers nor engineering graduates have the experience of building complex systems, let alone under time, tech leadership and management pressure. It is likely that the original authors may have found themselves in a situation where they were tasked to build a trivial form with technologies they were not accustomed to at the request of some superior and they ended writing a soup.
  - gloryjulio 9mo ago
    Many years ago, I used Redux to build real time streaming data processing layer. Basically I need to receive, merge, and process multiple data streams into a single realtime data pool. After that,consuming the realtime data becomes dead easy. Even now I am not sure I could find a better tool to deal with real time data and synchronization. But for simple crud Redux is mostly overkill

TuringNYC 9mo ago

>> This brought me flashbacks of jQuery spaghetti monsters from years ago, some were Backbone related. To be fair, jQuery was a response to the the IE and JS variant mess of the early 2000s. jQuery made development possible without debugging across three browser varients.

ompogUe 9mo ago
Standardized selectors was the big use case for me

root_axis 9mo ago

React made complex interactive UIs a lot easier to manage than jQuery, but that resulted in many developers adding a lot more complexity just because they could.