I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.
He makes an interesting observation at the end:
However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.
Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, thevastmajority of sites out there on the web arenotbeing built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.
This is grim:
If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production,it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yetstilldoesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.
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:
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 havepower.
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 absolutelynot“standard”.
The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.
Amen!
Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.
Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.
It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.
My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.
This is a terrific talk byJackon how to deal with the tooling involved in modern front-end development:
- Maintaining control,
- Dependency awareness,
- Lean on browser primitives,
- Have an exit strategy.
Fear of a third-party planet.
A small-scale conspiracy theory from the innards of Google.
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Business, sustainability, and inclusivity.
Inside me there are two wolves. They’re both JavaScript.