The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves

Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:

1. The Landscape
2. Object Lesson
3. Caprock
4. The Way Out

The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.

Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.

Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason

A depressing but accurate description of the economics of web development.

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.

Front-end development’s identity crisis - Elly Loel

I know how to do full-stack development, not because I wanted to but because I had to.

Grim, but true. I know quite a few extremely talented front-end developers who have been forced out of the field because of what’s described here.

There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.

Kind of annoyed at React

React was never able to stand on its own merits as a framework (as its merits are few). Now the cracks are really starting to show.