I’ve been dipping my toes into NextJS, Vercel, PlanetScale, and other serverless / edge providers, and there’s so many terms / concepts thrown my way that I feel overwhelmed a lot of the time.
I mean, I’m already a web developer well versed with React, and I love my SPA setup with Vite, so for others outside the web dev space, this must be a nightmare to keep up with.
Was curious to hear your thoughts on the rapidly evolving space of web dev.
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I could best sum up my answer to this question as “lol no”
Not proud of it though!
I thought I kind of was… and then I saw your post! I’m coming out of years writing plugins in large old school open source PHP projects and it’s such treat to write my own thing with a nice shiny stack (Laravel/Vue/Vite). PHP8 and ES6 are so much more expressive than their predecessors as well.
I know very little to none about serverless / edge, but to be honest I’ve made peace with the fact I’ll never know everything about the web dev ecosystem. Trying to improve every day is a more attainable goal.
I do my best to keep up, but it depends heavily on what my day job has me working with and how modern they keep their tech stack.
Personally, I avoid any fronted dev and stick to backed.
Does Blazor count? I’ve done a little with that. Mostly though, no. My job doesn’t require much frontend work and even if it did it would be jQuery at best.
I don’t think you’d really need to either unless you genuinely enjoy being at the bleeding edge. React, Angular and Vue aren’t going anywhere any time soon. That could be laziness talking…
I work mainly with Ruby on Rails. Picked up Vue. I try-harded Elm, ended up with Elixir on my personal project right now (without phoenix). I gave up on shiny front ends. jQuery is still my favorite go to now. Let’s see how long it will last.
About ten years ago, I was getting stressed out about it. Someone told me:
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Stick to what you know well, if it will do what you want the end user won’t care.
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If what you know won’t do what you want, find the thing that will do what you want and just focus on that. No need to go down a million rabbit holes.
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If your team is using something you don’t know, learn that and just focus on that and ask for help if you get lost.
I’ve found this advice to be extremely useful.
I’m managing some devs right now, one of whom is going really slowly. She’s determined to do her part of the project in React. I said to her “How comfortable are you in React.” She said “Not really, I’m totally new to it. I’ve used Angular in the past and React is really different.” I said “Why aren’t you doing your part of the project in Angular?” She had no good answer.
I feel like when you’re managing a team you also have to consider the skills you want future devs to have to have. Not saying this is necessarily the case for you (for all I know you already have a mix of React and Angular), but on my teams we have bottlenecks when we need to do work in certain plugins because only one person knows VB6, or WPF, or has the license for the third party library needed to compile the plugin. The dev may not be available for weeks/months because other teams need work done in that tech. If everyone’s using the same stack you can just assign tasks to people based on their availability.
I feel like when you’re managing a team you also have to consider the skills you want future devs to have to have.
I fully agree.
This particular case is a startup in a very sensitive area rushing to MVP that has chosen to imbue it’s devs with a lot of autonomy and build a distributed infrastructure where they treat each other as black boxes. This decision was made before me, not that I necessarily agree or disagree, it’s mostly working, but I’m struggling to get everyone to document their shit and I’m concerned about bus factor and replacing people / maintaining these systems in the future.
Anyway, I think that was her thinking when she chose React (wanting to learn it) but her progress has been underwhelming at the last few standups (she’s built very little while the rest of the team is rocketing along). She’s built so little in the last three weeks that she even agreed (today) that pivoting to Angular makes sense. We’ll see if she can catch up.
That’s fair–the right stack is the one that delivers on time. I wish her good luck and less stressful future sprints
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I gave up when back in the day, we had like JQuery, AngularJS, Vue.js, React.js, and so forth and so I just stick with JQuery for better or worse for most of my professional career in ASP.Net Core development. (CDN alleviate the trouble of distributing JQuery and web browser would cache it, so I don’t put much stock on people claiming that it’s bloated or heavy.)
I often bring up that we just needed better GUI toolkit with a designer and to replace all of HTML/JS/CSS with just WebASM and WebGPU. Rather than supporting legacy crappy unholy trinity languages, we could push for “survival of the fittest” languages/tools to fill into this space.
When I start to feel overwhelmed, I just go check the Days since the last new JavaScript framework counter.
Usually calms me down.
I’m in a very similar boat as you, and I often feel frustrated with how much there is I’m not keeping track of. But I don’t really like coding side projects in my free time, so I just learn as deeply as I can about the frameworks my works teams are using. It tends to pay off insofar as people can usually tell that I’ve done research, so at the very least it helps me less less insecure…
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I used to keep up but eventually just burned out. I do plenty at work so if I do have a hobby project in mind, I tend to do something other than just webdev, to spite it up a little bit.
It does feel scary sometimes just how quickly you can get outdated, especially with frontend. I want to stick to backend but it feels like all the fancy jobs eventually end up with 90% work being on front, APIs and DB seem like the easiest part of it all (especially if managed properly)
Man, we just finally got away from supporting Internet Exploder.
Yeah I still style my pages with tables 😅
