The unnecessary SPA is really getting to me recently. For a while, it was just blogspot deciding I didn’t really need to read this article right away, and I could wait five seconds for it to grind some gears. But now I see more sites that are atrociously broken.
There’s been a good amount of sportsball recently so I’ve been trying to read sbnation.com on my phone. Too bad every single page load results in a completely blank display until I refresh. I’m sure that’s great for my data cap. Also means I may read an article if I particularly care, but I’m bouncing without mercy as soon as I’m done. Isn’t this shit supposed to increase engagement? Fail.
Aaaand the top comment is, “instead of whining why not improve it yourself!” That’s not constructive, that’s a thought-terminating cliche.
A bad idea can’t be improved the magic of the community. That’s what makes it bad. It’s still bad even if Hacker News is going crazy over it. Think for yourself.
Also, pervasive cultural anti-patterns might make trying to improve something futile until those anti-patterns are addressed. There are at least two sets of problems in play here: one where things are shoddy from a technical perspective, and one where developers go “ooh, shiny” and chase after new things regardless of their technical merit.
I was so annoyed to see that; “never bring up a problem if you can’t do anything about it” is a complete dead-end. How do you think people become able to do something about things? By discussing, arguing, talking it over.
Was this posted on medium as a joke? It took a full minute for any text to appear on my phone, then I had to stop it loading so I don’t blow my monthly cap on the images.
As a backend engineer, I tried to build a little JS frontend for a backend service I wrote. I don’t know how the frontenders do it. I tried 3 or 4 frameworks that claimed to make all of this easy but could not get them to work. Debugging was very difficult and the documentation all spent a lot of time telling me how easy things would be without delivering. I eventually just had to give up. I was really bummed out because I thought it would be nice to know how it works.
I’m not sure if it’s just the snob in me or not, but I think one must appreciate a certain level of brokeness to make it in JavaScript land. I constantly found myself up against walls of not understanding why something worked a particular way and found it, mentally, very difficult to get around it.
I’m sure web development is in a sad state – in my opinion, all software development is in a sad state – but there’s nothing really that interesting in the OP. It’s a jeremiad, but not a good one. It won’t persuade anybody who loves their Node, and it won’t entertain the rest of us. Compare to, for instance.
I appreciate a good vent, I’m prone to them myself, but this is not an exemplar of the form. 1/5, would not read again.
I like how this guy thinks he’s smarter than the entire Facebook Engineering team.
People build frameworks because jQuery soup was a real problem and complex UIs are complex.
Stop holding up poor uses of technology to condemn the technology.
I usually am of the mindset that current JavaScript tools are too complex and fragile, but they’re created for a reason and this post is nothing but strawmen and hubris.
Some of the tech criticism may be unwarranted, but I think references to magpie developers are there to show the real problem is the developers who need to use all of the shiny in every project. There may be nothing wrong with react, but I remain skeptical that it’s the best technology for imgur to craft a webpage that displays an image.
I’m not sure how this happens, but I think this rant is a call to arms to prevent certain amounts of stupid. “Should I use rails or node?” you ask. “Is there a way we can use both?” asks your manager. Sigh.
I like how this guy thinks he’s smarter than the entire Facebook Engineering team.
That was unnecessary. And why the veneration of $BIGCORP engineers? I’m sure they’re great, but it’s not like they operate at a different level or anything.
My takeaway, which is more inspired by the article than a straight summary of it:
Front-end frameworks have their uses, in fixing the performance and organization problems that simpler JavaScript has. But before using a framework, consider its own performance problem (slow page startup) and the strong likelihood of churn (need to upgrade/rewrite soon). If your app is not very interactive, you should limit JavaScript to the pages that need it because of these problems.
I’m disappointed he edited the post to basically say, “I was just mad, it’s all good.” It ends up hedging the entire essay on a bad day, rather than community dysfunction.
The unnecessary SPA is really getting to me recently. For a while, it was just blogspot deciding I didn’t really need to read this article right away, and I could wait five seconds for it to grind some gears. But now I see more sites that are atrociously broken.
There’s been a good amount of sportsball recently so I’ve been trying to read sbnation.com on my phone. Too bad every single page load results in a completely blank display until I refresh. I’m sure that’s great for my data cap. Also means I may read an article if I particularly care, but I’m bouncing without mercy as soon as I’m done. Isn’t this shit supposed to increase engagement? Fail.
Either a completely blank page or a wall of garbled text
Aaaand the top comment is, “instead of whining why not improve it yourself!” That’s not constructive, that’s a thought-terminating cliche.
A bad idea can’t be improved the magic of the community. That’s what makes it bad. It’s still bad even if Hacker News is going crazy over it. Think for yourself.
Also, pervasive cultural anti-patterns might make trying to improve something futile until those anti-patterns are addressed. There are at least two sets of problems in play here: one where things are shoddy from a technical perspective, and one where developers go “ooh, shiny” and chase after new things regardless of their technical merit.
I was so annoyed to see that; “never bring up a problem if you can’t do anything about it” is a complete dead-end. How do you think people become able to do something about things? By discussing, arguing, talking it over.
Was this posted on medium as a joke? It took a full minute for any text to appear on my phone, then I had to stop it loading so I don’t blow my monthly cap on the images.
Sounds like he has a bit more recovering to do…. :-D
You probably didn’t get that far, but this was at the end of the article….
The next generation of technologists are intent on learning the necessity of owning what they write the hard way.
As a backend engineer, I tried to build a little JS frontend for a backend service I wrote. I don’t know how the frontenders do it. I tried 3 or 4 frameworks that claimed to make all of this easy but could not get them to work. Debugging was very difficult and the documentation all spent a lot of time telling me how easy things would be without delivering. I eventually just had to give up. I was really bummed out because I thought it would be nice to know how it works.
I’m not sure if it’s just the snob in me or not, but I think one must appreciate a certain level of brokeness to make it in JavaScript land. I constantly found myself up against walls of not understanding why something worked a particular way and found it, mentally, very difficult to get around it.
I’m sure web development is in a sad state – in my opinion, all software development is in a sad state – but there’s nothing really that interesting in the OP. It’s a jeremiad, but not a good one. It won’t persuade anybody who loves their Node, and it won’t entertain the rest of us. Compare to, for instance.
I appreciate a good vent, I’m prone to them myself, but this is not an exemplar of the form. 1/5, would not read again.
Bit of a rant, but i can sympathize with the author. The node.js community reminds me heavily of the php4 community.
Ugh. The Sad State of this argument.
I like how this guy thinks he’s smarter than the entire Facebook Engineering team.
People build frameworks because jQuery soup was a real problem and complex UIs are complex.
Stop holding up poor uses of technology to condemn the technology.
I usually am of the mindset that current JavaScript tools are too complex and fragile, but they’re created for a reason and this post is nothing but strawmen and hubris.
Some of the tech criticism may be unwarranted, but I think references to magpie developers are there to show the real problem is the developers who need to use all of the shiny in every project. There may be nothing wrong with react, but I remain skeptical that it’s the best technology for imgur to craft a webpage that displays an image.
I’m not sure how this happens, but I think this rant is a call to arms to prevent certain amounts of stupid. “Should I use rails or node?” you ask. “Is there a way we can use both?” asks your manager. Sigh.
That was unnecessary. And why the veneration of $BIGCORP engineers? I’m sure they’re great, but it’s not like they operate at a different level or anything.
My takeaway, which is more inspired by the article than a straight summary of it:
Front-end frameworks have their uses, in fixing the performance and organization problems that simpler JavaScript has. But before using a framework, consider its own performance problem (slow page startup) and the strong likelihood of churn (need to upgrade/rewrite soon). If your app is not very interactive, you should limit JavaScript to the pages that need it because of these problems.
I’m disappointed he edited the post to basically say, “I was just mad, it’s all good.” It ends up hedging the entire essay on a bad day, rather than community dysfunction.