Asko Nõmm reached a breaking point with front end:
I want to have a personal life and not have to spend my nights reading up on some new flavour of *.js in fear that if I don’t I would soon be made irrelevant. I don’t want to learn nor use a million different tools. I don’t want to know a bit about everything and a lot about nothing.
Thus, I don’t want to do front-end development anymore. The joy is gone.
They literally spun up this blog to say that, but money-where-mouth-is:
I’ve given in my resignation at my current place of employment and will be seeking an exclusively back-end role for my next adventure
I have some doubts that back end is 100% better in regards to technology churn, but fair enough, I don’t hear about it as much. Front-end dissatisfaction is awfully high. I don’t go a day without hearing someone complain broadly about the state of front end.
Remy Sharp addressed this in The web didn’t change; you did:
If you didn’t gather off the bat from the title, the problem with developing front end projects isn’t that it’s harder or more complicated, it’s that you made it harder and more complicated.
Minor pushback there: a lot of people don’t get any choice in the technologies they are tasked with.
Remy’s point is that literally any simplicity that you hold nostalgia for on the web is still there and there is nothing stopping you from using it. Other than, ya know, if your client or boss prevents that.
Marc (last name appears intentionally not-on-the-internet) says that just HTML is a perfectly fine building tool:
Despite increasing leniency on frameworks being the only way to build for the web, hand-written HTML never disappeared and I feel is still a perfectly suitable way to build a personal website.
Remember Steren Giannini said recently they build websites with HTML alone and zero build process. And Terence Eden praised HTML for its unreasonable effectiveness:
Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).
It’s nice to think that you can build an important website, avoid any sort of wild complexity, and have it do its job without any harm, with HTML.
Personally, I don’t harbor any ill will toward the front-end ecosystem at the moment. I’m aware that I can step backward from complexity if I have to, and that I can lean into complexity when it buys me things (speed, features, DX, etc) and know what it costs me (and users) and why.
Wow, so fucking agree with that article, damn!!! A couple of years back I left my job as front end dev, tired of all building tools, and new stuff coming out every year, … Which increase first complexity, productivity and doesn t actually add sens. Good old html, css a bit of js and you good. Years ago amazing websites were built only with that and it was working fine! How many hours, days, or weeks I lost time, instead of doing things my way, good structured css, good structured html and js. Last crazy shit out there, TAILWIND. Any thing can be done without and better, what was the point to learn css, proper naming conventions such BEM and then you forget all, you add your classes, but wait not all are available in tailwind so you have to add plugin, in this file and another stuff in this file then compile, then test, fucking hell there is something called css, it has been there for ever and it works everywhere. Nowaday, I’m trying to work as freelance, all my projects are done the good all way, it s fast to build for me and not slower for the user than using hyper complex front end tools. Fast and clean and every person working on my projects can understand, no need to compile that or this, no need to add plugins, no need to add anything complex.
And you know what? I don t feel ashamed!!
This!! This is the comment right here! I mean why learn css then. I feel like these people just afraid of using css. If at all you want to take it far, Sass should be your final stop. No more, no less.
Honestly I’ve made up my mind that I won’t learn all these technologies. I’ll stick to my sass, and react. Many good companies that don’t require such complex techs are still out there.
Please share your stack! I gave it my absolute best shot to go down this route, but it got too hard to keep track of.
Yeah I hate getting fed articles about new .js frameworks and the like, but this article and a bunch of the comments seem very gate-keeper like. Yeah you can get away with pure HTMl and CSS a lot of the time, but a lot of my recent clients have asked for stuff that I need to have js frameworks for. Being able to animate in After Effects and have it play back on a browser. Cool you can be fed up with it, but if the client asks and has explicit boards mocked up with crazy animations, effects, and the like, you have to deliver and most of the time, vanilla HTMl and CSS will not get me there.
Yeah it sucks keeping up with tech, but how else are you going to stay informed and competitive? I’ve given up on learning React Redux and most new state management changes to React, that’s where I draw the line. I’m talking from Freelance / Contractor positions.
Well, if you need to do crazy animations, no need for frameworks, just use Gsap, you need crazy cool page transitions, use barba and gsap. You need 3D cool stuff, use three js, you need silky smooth canvas animation/interaction use pixi js. I really don t see where frameworks are essential in the visual part of a website. I’m particulary interested in web animation, interaction and user experience (I m coming from a graphic design background) and you don t need framework at all for that. I’m always checking websites on awwwards, 70% of them can be done the good old ways. Last bad experience I had, I applied for 2 jobs lately, for doing websites, in both studio I was going to do the exact same thing : building beautiful websites. First answer, ‘hey dude, amazing work, but do you know any techno (framework)? I answered no, but happy to learn, no answer back from the company. Second studio : ‘hey dude, amazing job, we want you, when do you want to start’. I’m like “wtf”, for the first studio even if I have 7 years experience building website and a good portfolio, if I don t know a framework I don t even deserve an answer. One last thing about web animation, css animation is super powerfull, sometime even more than js animation, coupled with css variables it s amazing. So I have 2 choices, deep learning css and vanilla js, or loosing my hairs with new technologies, delivering beautifull experiences made with “old school” way of doing or being considered by my pairs because I know Vue, React and angular and I can use them all in the same time, well easy answer.
A lot of canvas libs and awards stuff you make it a pain to work with frameworks because they extend window
I’ve been working in software for about 15 years and I am mostly dissatisfied with the current state of front-end development as well.
I have always thought that html & css are easy enough that anyone can learn it, and that simplicity is what allows designers (who don’t necessarily have to be the best programmers) to produce some really incredible web work. Now it has become so complex and sophisticated that the people who tend to “own” the front-end are the software engineers who are the strongest Javascript developers. In many cases these software engineers don’t even have good design skills, so the overall workflow requires an even more coordinated effort with the UI design team. With libraries like Angular and React it feels like the front-end now has its own back-end; a “back-end of the front-end”.
A few years ago I created a concept that I called “RAP stack”. It attempted to create a separation between the artist and engineer by intentionally keeping as much sophistication on the back-end as possible. I’m painfully aware that many software engineers would scoff at some of the technology that it embraces, but I was able to implement this very successfully on a project that powers a mission-critical project for a growing a company.
https://benharrison.cc/projects/rapstack/
Here’s more details on my proof-of-concept project. It leverages strong typing, thorough unit testing, dependency injection, and so on. Just none of that exists in the presentation layer.
https://benharrison.cc/projects/mastersuite/
I feel like a big part of this is the complexity of our build setups. I have recently been on a tear trying to simplifying my build setups, and honestly that alone has removed a lot of the anxiety of maintaining frontend dev (for me).
The problem seems to be more the JS ecosystem and not front/back end. Unfortunately, frontend is now synonymous with JS, where backend has a lot more options.
Yeah, you can use HTML if you want. That’s nice – and totally had nothing to do with anything because no one is going to hire you to write HTML.
I think if you master React, that’s been leading a safe bet for the past 5 years or so. Sure, they changed things up with hooks, but learning new features of stacks you’re already using is not a big investment
Nice wild assertion, but react is part of the problem.
The point here is that yet another.js can go take a run and jump.
I hit this same problem and refuse to use a thing more than a bit of jQuery because why should we?
Nothing react does adds anything to the page that plain old js + jQuery hasn’t done for well over a decade now.
TehWardy — While I don’t personally use React. You can’t compare them to something like jQuery.
jQuery had it’s time, about 99% of it’s use case is baked right into JS now anyway and I don’t see any practical need to ever use it again. Aside from maintaining legacy codebases.
The types of applications that things like React/Vue/Svelte/[insert framework here] are used for a done so because those tools are well suited to the job and trying to build those applications with something like jQuery, is like trying to build a modern website using floats as the main layout mechanism. It can still be done, but that doesn’t mean it should.
Checkout LiveView, Hotwire, or Livewire. They’re all working at a common goal of bringing back fullstack without all the JS
Livewire is exactly what makes me unhappy about new tools. Livewire is a 80÷ solution and the last 20÷ drives you up the wall. I used it and I constantly have strange bugs and things that work in very strange ways. It looked good, but it is an awful experience to work with.
If a technology in web development, either in backend or frontend, is less than 10 years old, chances are high, that it is crap and everybody will forget about it soon.
Frameworks are fancy, but progressive enhancement is the only thing that worked, works, and will ever work when it comes to web development, no matter who you are or what device you use. I’m glad this article touches upon that, albeit briefly.
I felt like I was reading something from someone who had looked into my soul. The front-end has priced itself out of the barrable market. With all of the crap out there to learn and more crap coming down the crappy pipeline, I’ve had it. I have decided to leave development all together and I have found great joy in exiting the profession and slamming doors behind me. I would rather be an accountant, math teacher, or foot model at this point and have a life than return to learning this.js or that.js.
Why not try full stack development? I prefer angular in the frontend, spring boot and kotlin in the back. Everything flows pretty smoothly, just line the code and you’re done.
Maybe im weird, but for me the best part of software development in general is that there is always something to learn and get better or get new persective. Im pretty sure otherwise ill get bored in couple of years.
I feel like frontend now is much more stable than 2-3 year. We have stable frameworks and much new hot things that turns out to not be hot. I have a feeling that Asko problem was not in frontend but not understanding tools that he used. You don’t use it because it is not cool to use simple html. You use it to make your work easier and if you don’t see it, you probably use wrong tool. Programing is about solving problem you use tool because you need it not because it is trendy.
Yeah, I can empathize with that very well. There is so many stuff to learn and to keep updated with constantly in an ever so fast changing world.
I was let go of my former company because of Corona in October, and it hit me hard. Now I am taking a year in social working to clear my mind and to decide what I really want to progress with. Good luck to all people out there.
Very similar issue with me right now. Honestly looking into UX/UI design and Shopify —- all as a freelancer.
I love frontend, but I hate working with it the way it is done today.
If you get any frontend tool and compare its API with what it was 5 years ago, you will see its like another thing. I use jQuery and the infamous Bootstrap Framework and it seems like they never changed, so I believe its possible to have things packed and tooled upfront for you and get modern as well.
Maybe the problem with these frontend tools is that they change so much that forces everyone to become slave of them. That said, I can suspiciously think that this is done by design to make people stick to their brands or intellectual properties as any TV advertisement for the masses, to sell something like a book, a course, a workshop, a meetup… or facebook ads, google ads, or even to make someone’s ego shine… and If my English is not so bad you got me here! The problem with all the disatisfaction mentioned by most is that the majority won’t have power and money to fight against, so it can safely be labeled as a new social disease. So in this case I think its time to start some kind of manifesto or movement in order to help those people. Sometimes, and I am just brainstorming here, it is the case to watch people who overcame this and try to learn from them.
What gets the hell out of me is that OpenSource is used to bake that all!
Omg!! I sooo agree with you dude!!! Switching to UX Design now, it is just no more fun. Every few weeks another framework i don’t need. Good ole css does it all. But no, compile this, mixin that, jest it all…sick of it. The employers have a 2 page list of stuff they wanna work with. I even refuse to use Bootstrap ;) Hope i will have more joy doing UX/UI in the future.
Agreed. A big problem I see is this misconception that web apps must always be built as SPA’s.
My current personal project is good O’l templates and server generated html.
And for me, a lot of the joy has returned as a result.
I totally get this. I have been saying for years now, that HTML needs to have better component/module support natively. When I add a nav tag, all I should be doing is passing data to it in a defined format as an attribute value, then using properties that define how the nav should layout and bam the browser builds it. Blocks, accordions, cards, lists, scollers, you name it, all the things we use js for to build fancy UI components or modules or whatever you want to call them need to be native to the language and handled by the browser, much like the select element, and then we can style it with css. Then all this js framework bs can finally end.
I agree with you 100% the wheel is always being reinvented. You learn something one way but then its time to change the end result is almost always the same. Perfect example React with state componemts was working just fine but now we must know react hooks and context…etc
I really understand the frustration caused by those brand-new-js-revolution-of-the-week.
But, in the other hand, I wonder if we all could be bored and unsatisfied due to the lack of changes and innovation, in case we were living an opposite reality.
Always having something new to learn is a good thing. However, having to learn something new every quarter is harmful for our mental health.
The concept of complexity as a cost is very interesting. To think of introducing complexity without a clear return value as a dept or never spend more than your capacity as an analogy. Complexity can only be profitable if the return value is higher than the cost. Although, it is sometimes hard to evaluate.
You’re right guys but if you think this problematic belongs to the frontend alone maybe you’re not seeing the hole picture. Sysadmin, backend, project managers and so on .. maybe your best choice would be DBA but then you have to consider if you’re gonna stay with relational database or if you are going to spin the wheel of new technologies or architecture to learn again.
That’s why we’re seeing all those fullstack jobs offering out there but believe me it’s a nightmare. You don’t have to believe me, we’re discussing this problem with frontend developers right?
Anyway maybe you have the option to say “wait.. I can do both frontend and backend, actually I know how to structure, deploy, manage and query my databases, and I don’t have any troubles at all with workspace environments so yeah.. I can apply for that job ”
Just eat the prohibited apple and quit to a personal life.
A few weeks ago I saw a course advertised for full stack “for free” for just eighteenth thousand dollars and the funny about that was the course itself.. 3 modules, 18 months, and you’ll be spending 12 months in just theorizing about technology. A real joke. Yeah! You’re ready go get them!
What we are talking about is not a problem of technology evolution, it’s just the fundamental reason why this sector of industry has been always creating new opportunities.
I feel scared about losing the separation of concerns principle because I also want to live my life as a human being
Wow such negative feelings towards front end. Javascript is not complicated. React is not complicated. It is us as engineers who have taken our tools and created a mess out of them.
Backend languages/frameworks seem to have a much more standardised way of doing things, possibly due to maturity or being taken more seriously. This is sorely missing from the JS community.
Javascript/ React; it’s not you it’s us.
I was thinking, I am the only one who can think that.
Also this is a generational issue, with a little of sprinkles of “I want to make a mark”.
With this article my family can understand that better.
You needs to learn (spends long hours, nights) a whole new framework to save .06 ms on each request. And a year and a half later. This wonderful tool was a waste, because with all you need to use; you are having a more than .07ms on each request, or you are loading more resources and your overall is too heavy.
And at that moment a new wave of ….. Coming with this fantastic tool…..
You don’t have to learn all the frameworks, just learn one and that would do the trick. Now the state of building tools is much better and easier, you actually have to know much less to perform the same chunk of work, especially for an easy project. If you love css and design then become a designer, there are positions where you prototype with css as a designer, and they earn equally to developers, as far as I’m concerned. I personally hate css and design, I love complex stuff, and I love it when this complexity works smoothly and fast. So it’s up to you, stop being miserable and do what you love.
This article perfectly expresses my main reasons for retiring early. The first half of my career I LOVED learning new tools and techniques, but at some point the frameworks started coming so fast I was putting more effort into relearning my job than actually doing it. There was a time when I felt like a genuine expert software developer, but after I got into web dev that feeling never really came back. I felt like a perpetual noob.
A couple of points.
The complaints I’ve been reading on this forum are well grounded but misplaced. Developers should be overjoyed with the direction of FED. More complexity === greater pay, more opportunities and better professionalism.
Secondly, you don’t need to know every library related to CSS or JS. If you do, there’s something amiss in how you position your skills and you’re working too far down value. Rise up the value chain .
Thirdly, learning new CSS and JS libs is much easier if you know the underlying principles, paradigms and language. I know a dev who knew several CSS libs but didn’t know CSS. Had his CSS been stronger, he would have picked up the other libs with significantly less pain.
Likewise, if your JS is weak, every JS framework is going to be painful. If your knowledge of design patterns is weak, learning new JS frameworks and architecture will be painful.
If your knowledge of reactive programming is weak, your code will likely lack lots of subtleties which can add technical debt in addition to the added pain of learning new frameworks.
I’ve worked with devs who’ve memorized Redux or GraphQL but failed to pick up the underlying design patterns and algorithms which would have facilitate learning and mastery.
The point is get better educated and you’ll develop a meta perspective on framework which will help you pick up code faster in addition to writing better code.
You missed the point. It is the mental fatigue people are talking about. What is the point of learning multiple tools that do roughly the same thing and are constantly evolve. How is that gonna improve your productivity. You taking a simplistic approach
“Developers should be overjoyed with the direction of FED. More complexity === greater pay, more opportunities and better professionalism.”
I’ve been overjoyed about it while also overstressed about the sudden avalanche of fresh sexism and just stigma about being a developer who knows a lot about HTML, CSS and UX that’s been thrown at me since. I’ve been in meetings where devs literally said that people like me can’t really be real engineers right in front of me, and nobody did or said a thing, really.
Thankfully, I’ve found that there are roles where this doesn’t happen, but it’s a lot of work or luck to find them. Chris’s posts on the subject really have helped me make sense of it all, too.
Completely agree with your comment and think it’s spot on.
Yes it is true that the complexity has gone up and I’ve been spending more time being a “configurator”. And I am indeed frustrated by the immaturity of parts of the ecosystem. But knowing the underlying technologies well is what allows me to do this without overwhelming frustration, it allows me to debug and fix things. It also allows me to know when NOT to use things.
In my ~3 years writing react applications I have never-ever used redux. I’ve barely ever used contexts and I’ve only used styled components because the project I was dropped at used them. Thus I don’t have any frustration built up.
I was writing a gatsby application and I furiously refused to use graphql query components in my code, not even the useQuery hook in my components because I realized how amazingly wrong that architecture is. I had decoupled my application code from the gatsby crap, so if anything changed on the end of gatsby, my react code could still function properly. Or even, I could migrate it to next with considerably less pain.
Having being in town for quite some time, I use the modern frameworks to get what I know I need out of them (eg. routing, bundling, automatic dom updates) , embrace some of the goodies, and throw away the junk features that come on top.
(sarcasm on)
Finally the truth comes out … But wait a minute: The whole framework stuff is important for the ego, so that one may feel not “only” as an HTML writer, but also like a “real” programmer …
(sarcasm off)
I find this post interesting, and I find these comments fascinating. But what bothers me is that hardly anyone is acknowledging is the point of view of each other.
If your employers or clients need you to work on ecommerce sites, then you have to use an ecommerce tools like WooCommerce or Shopify (if you’re okay with closed source).
If your clients need to be able to log in, you need to use some sort of content management system; Drupal, WordPress, Webflow (closed source), etc.
If you have to work on very interactive web apps, then using a FE framework like Angular / React / Vue is pretty much a requirement.
If you’re building websites, and none of the above true, only then are you free to go old-school and use plain old HTML and CSS with a sprinkling of JavaScript. If that’s you, yay, you’re free to embrace the simplest (or most appealing) way to work!
Finally a realistic point of view :)
This post and comments speak to me on a serious level. My high school IT teacher taught me the fear that I would be made redundant if I stuck with only low level languages like HTML and CSS my whole career.
I never bothered seriously trying to learn JS or React over the years after more than a few videos and realizing how deep the rabbit hole will be.
I aim for wordpress managed sites and focus on Speed, SEO, get to put more time into sharpening my true design skills, stress less and take home the same as a React dev seems to be paying (Seek and FB).
On that bloody 10/10 to the whole CSS Tricks team because I unashamedly think it’s the fastest processing and nicest to write.
The thing I love about front end is the fact that I don’t ever get bored. There is always something new to learn. I’ve been doing front end since the “webmaster” days of the early 2000’s.
I took left turn to do some backend development at some point because it was an area I wanted to improve in. Now I do bits of both, now teaching front end dev.
Front end is no different to any other I.T skill, there is always research happening and out of that new ways of doings things emerge and you have to learn it. Sure it may move fast, but you don’t have to learn and know everything.
It’s just part of the game and I dig it.
I’ll repeat Doug: “The first half of my career I LOVED learning new tools and techniques (…) There was a time when I felt like a genuine expert software developer, but after I got into web dev that feeling never really came back. I felt like a perpetual noob.”
I’m not a luddite or anything, but I work in several teams and projects and now, with so many distinct stacks, just setting up a new project in your local machine is a pain that consumes much more time than actually building things.
Haha. This one is for the Asko Nõmm. You are not alone. I wrote the article below almost 1 year prior to this post. Inside you will find a reference to an article written almost 3 years ago.
We ended in this mess because we want to look busy, to give mass to what we do, we were the ones to complicate this entire thing. Things were simple, but we didn’t “single source of truth”, “state control”, “SOC” and other bullshit zombies stories we like to tell ourselves when we are in the face of a company owner that only wants his/her business to work.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/programming-today-tiberiu-georgescu
Place I’ve been working the past 4 years. I haven’t touched react, angular or Vue. Everything I make is plain html (use pug) and scss. After that we put everything in our CMS as templates. It’s a bit more work, but it’s enjoyable.
However not having much experience with JS frameworks, makes it very difficult to find a more lucrative job.
It’s like photoshop, you can do à lot of effets but if all are used on one picture it’s just ugly.
Using one or two API because its provide an util or whaoo effect is OK but
thèse days, according to some guys, thé job sounds like an old famous headline: Hey, there is an “API” for that! And they using those on every single stuff…
Don’t they have àny html, css, js and php basis?
Using React? If your website is massive as Amazon or Facebook maybe it’s OK, otherwise module are now native.
As someone who’s been in the industry for decades, I find all the posts about framework fatigue frankly irritating and totally agree with Remy Sharp:
you don’t have to learn all the shiny tools all the time. It’s pressure you choose to put yourself under
in 2007 tooling was already complicated – if memory serves I used Bower, Ant for building, YUI for testing, some abomination called Sprocket for templating, jQuery in some projects but Prototype or Dojo in others, different flavours CSS preprocessors (PHP powered – so you had to get your hands dirty with that)… you get the drift
professional work is complicated, because there is money and teams of people are involved, it’s not the tech in itself. Is someone seriously suggesting Java or C++ projects are any better??!?
it’s not any harder to be job ready nowadays – “back in the days” there was no Stack Overflow back then, nor a plethora of courses on Udemy etc for 10 bucks, nor army of devs on Twitter, mointains of books, piles of boilerplate on Gitlab, etc etc. In fact, it’s actually much easier to get started now
So if you don’t like FE anymore fair enough, but please no. More. Whinging. About framework fatigue
I also find that using some of those JS-frameworks makes front-end development wayyy too complicated.
-sponsored by the Blazor gang
In 1994 I built my first website in html and css and in the past few months built 3 websites solely in html & bootstrap. It just wasn’t necessary to be in a CMS. Security & load on our server, databases, etc has become such a big issue it was great not to worry about another domain taking up unnecessary resources. And more environmental friendly I think too!
This makes me feel so much better as a newbie. I love front-end development and it has a lot to do with coming straight from the design world. I’ve been working an entry-level position for two years now. I’m comfortable because they don’t require me to know all of the latest libraries. However, I find if I want a better paying job, they are very specific with the libraries they want you to use. It always makes me anxious. I think I’ll just freelance on the side instead of being overwhelmed by the hype.
Everything looks better if it is in balance, using just HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript, you can definitely create a front end of website, but ongoing trends matter, and you would have to learn technologies that are most trending so that you can be hired easily
And the kicker? Somehow backend developers are the “smart ones” and get paid more. Backend is much easier, in my opinion, it just bores the pants off me.
I’m switching to the back-end for the same reason. I think html/css will suffice too. These mega frameworks gave me the analysis paralysis. I couldn’t choose, so now I decided to go deeper and learn back-end.
I don’t know much about frontend, but do you guys believe that plain old html and css is scalable? If you really want to have a life I’d use tools that help me keep up with the changes and not modifying everything by hand, which is what half the people i read propose here, goosebumps.
Now probably those tools might not be the best, and yes, it’s surprising how new .js things appear and probably most of them just reinvent the wheel. That is the problem in my opinion. And yes, you will need to spend some time learning a new tool before you discover it doesn’t make things simpler but more complicated.
And what really makes me afraid by reading most (not all) of the comments here, is that many use the tools, tech etc without this criteria: is it helping me making things easier? Makes the dev work simpler? Then stick to what you have.
I just realized too that there must be a great bunch of people that come from the artistic world that are overwhelmed with the technical side. (Frankly I thought designers were long gone from the frontend dev and only engineers remained, with the way frontend dev is now – and well, if you want things to be maintainable and scalable I’m afraid frontend development has to keep being this way with a little bit more complexity than just html and css, but probably it doesn’t need solo many conolexity)
Seriously, I agree so much. Fatigue all the way.
It’s like I applied to be a taxi driver, but being forced to take an 18-wheeler cross-country, come back on a motorcycle and help the kids doing an ollie on their skateboard. It’s all wheels, right?
When I entered into the web development more than 10 years ago things were simpler. On the back-end side too.
Working with JavaScript was mostly learning OOP and trying to create an ergonomic code style that matches some of the back-end languages (PHP fx.). The framework ecosystem was not so crowded.
I remember people complaining some junior developers were starting with JQuery instead of the JS core but that is true today as well—for some React or Vue are the gates to the front-end world.
Things are definitely very unstable today and somehow chaotic. Will we ever standardize out front-end tooling…
1.积极接受更改并有选择地接受更改。
2.专精于某一个前端框架;
3.其他的新技术只了解但不使用。
1. Actively accept changes and selectively accept changes.
2. Specialize in a certain front-end framework;
3. Other new technology only to understand but not used.
If anyone else is having trouble accessing the blog post referenced in the first line of the post above, try:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210327000028/https://nomm.xyz/blog/i-dont-want-to-do-frontend-anymore/
Thanks for that!