Re:Advice to Young Web Developers
by danielheath on Friday June 19, 2020 @08:36AM
(#23573837)
I don’t know; I’ve got 8 years building JS-heavy frontends and more than that building backends / ops.
React isn’t too bad, as such things go, but compared to server rendering SPAs are such a slog.
There are good reasons to build them sometimes, but “fast and easy” is not one of them IME.
No, not exactly. I learnt JavaScript in the very early days, when we called it "Dynamic HTML". I mostly built very raw non-frameworked sites until a couple of years ago. I actually found learning Vue (~2 years ago) kind of difficult because of how inside out everything was, and I was still trying to picture what click handlers were being attached where, etc etc.
I was halfway through building a site when I switched to Vue. It ended up reducing the number of lines of code by 30-40%, and made the interactions much simpler to reason about.
Now that I know Vue, I think it's a vastly better way to develop than without it.
I suspect that perhaps you've learned primarily front-end frameworks for the majority of your career (an assumption, sorry if that's not right), which will make it seem as though frontend is easy compared to all this mystery stuff you're not used to working with.
It's the same for me, but the other direction. I've always worked with server-rendered applications, so to me all that stuff is super simple and working with frontend technologies involved learning a swath of new paradigms and tooling, so it seems like the more complicated one.
I think the learning point for me is simply that you're probably not going to care about what my arguments for server-side languages are, because it's never going to map to your experience of them. Just like I don't agree with any of your general points in the second paragraph.