The JS & frontend world is _seriously fun_ right now. If you blew it all off as a quagmire of complexity, sketchy engineering, treadmill of tools, etc... it's time to re-evaluate everything. I have more fun and feel more productive working on modern frontend stuff with tools like esbuild than any other GUI programming I've done in 30 years.
I agree. I was a web developer in the 90s when stuff was primitive, ugly and difficult.
I switched to desktop .Net development in 2001 did that for almost 15 years.
Since then I have been back on the web. I am full-stack so I find myself switching between front-end and back-end frequently.
I am enjoying my time more in the world of TypeScript, VS Code, and Angular than I am writing the back-end REST APIs in .Net Core and Visual Studio.
I was dreading going back to web development when I switched back again but recently it has turned out to be nicely structured, performant, logical and enjoyable.
My career sounds much like yours, and my conclusions are the same. Typescript is a decent language. The tooling is excellent. The old footguns are mostly behind us. It’s definitely a completely new ballgame vs the old hackery I used to have to endure.
If you have the resources available to you (e.g. your employer is willing to pay) Rider is an excellent alternative to Visual Studio. It should make backend dev more enjoyable.
Drag&drop building UI in Visual Whatever was plenty productive, hell they even had what the kids today call server rendering, and if it didn't look right I could always press F5 and see the result right there.
Every time I am unfortunate enough to do something front-end it's just as bad as I remember.
Edit: professionally, that is; when I do front-end related stuff for myself, it's fine, but they are small and I keep things simple - vanilla JS where needed, etc.
What do you remember? These days I’m no longer concerned about `this` pointing to the wrong object. Importing files is a huge step forward from when I started. The standard library has grown; a bunch of Lodash isn’t needed anymore because of it. Promises and async/await. Even just template strings! So glad I don’t have to concatenate with pluses and watching my double or single quotes.
React & next.js are worth evaluating. It's a super powerful full stack with everything from server side rendered data (REST APIs even) all the way to complete client-side SPAs, all using the same react components. It's a slick little swiss-army knife that can make anything from a basic blog with markdown content, to a static marketing page, to a full client-first PWA experience. There is sadly almost nothing else really like it right now.
Vue, and Svelte to just get an idea of what other components systems are like. They're all equally capable and just have different tradeoffs and styles. Keep an eye on Svelte in particular as its next.js-like system (SvelteKit) is working on a major revamp to be serverless-first and is quite interesting. Once you learn one component system it's easy to switch between them all--they're all cribbing and building on top of each other's ideas. The whole space is innovating in a great way.
Web components are good to learn and compare to component frameworks above. It's still a changing space but points to a nice future where we can all just publish and share components.
Yet none of the stuff you mention here will live beyond the next two years. Fun is as much as i would describe the js ecosystem, for more boring corporate use banking on these is the equivalent of getting a trojan horse in the application portfolio.
I'd be willing to stake money on React, Vue, next.js and Svelte surviving at least 2 more years - roughly in descending order of probability, though all three well above 50%.
That’s such an unqualified statement that I’d be embarrassed to say it out loud. Angular 1 apps are still in production. COBOL is still in production. I’d bet $100 that two years from this date, all three of those are still popular, being used by enterprise, and have tutorials written for them on blogs or produced on YouTube.
While that’s true, code using React in 2021 often bears little resemblance to code using React in 2013, and the ecosystem around it looks very different too.
It’s easy to forget that hooks were only introduced in React 16.8, which was released just over two years ago. And yet today, if you visit popular forums for React devs like /r/reactjs, you’ll find no shortage of people who will tell you that class-based components are ancient history and anyone who isn’t using hooks for everything today is a dinosaur.
This year, I’ve noticed a spate of online discussions about state management within the React ecosystem. Just like the hooks vs. classes debate of yesteryear, there is a striking contrast between those forever keen to do the new thing (sometimes using React’s own context and hooks, sometimes using relatively new libraries) and those who prefer to rely on more tried-and-tested tech like Redux and MobX.
In any situation like this, it’s sensible to question how much real progress is being made, and how much of the change is just lost productivity due to churn in tools and “best practices”. If so many developers think it’s normal to swap out most of your tools and coding style every couple of years or less, you have to wonder how long they expect anything they ever build to be maintained for or how often they think longer-lived software should have big rewrites just to update the tools…
In contrast, esbuild is shaping up to be an excellent tool. There seems to be a healthy focus on doing one common and important job well, it’s much better at it than the popular tools it potentially replaces, and it also seems designed to play nicely with others. It reminds me of the early days of 6to5/Babel, actually. This is what we need more of in the front-end web dev community right now.
The problem with front end development is that it's all bleeding edge and nothing that's stable and is improved for more than one hype cycle.
Suggesting more bleeding edge tech is not a good argument to demonstrate that front end development got better.
In my experience, it changed, it improved on many aspects, but it's still a pile of unstable crap running on the power of hype and over-enthusiastic junior engineers.
I get your frustration (and shared it a year ago), but you're really doing something like react a disservice by dismissing it like that as just hype. On the contrary react has evolved significantly over the years, introducing things like JSX (templating HTML + JS in the same file, now standard in every other component system), build tooling like create-react-app (zero config tooling, now standard in every JS build tool), functional component model with hooks (now copied by every other component library), and on the horizon stuff like server-side components. It has only gotten more stable, more proven, and easier to use over time.
I am not dismissing it. I appreciate what React is doing, and it is indeed revolutionary.
My point is that there has been a lot of evolution and improvement, but developer sanity is one of the few things that have just gone worse.
It is dishonest to look only at the bright side of modern frontend coding and forgetting the node_modules nightmare, the incredibly obtuse language, the slow compilation times, the myriad of CSS frameworks that are invented because CSS is an absolute pain in the arse for modern design, etc., the fact that every JS tool either is core to the whole circus and is maintained by a stressed out, underpaid person in the middle of nowhere, or has a minimum of 5k Github issues and a major version released every 3 months, and every time you get a problem you're told "haven't you tried the new alpha release of the big rewrite we've just started?".
It is absolute madness, not just frustrating. But yeah, React is cool.
totally! i have been developing a thesis around this I call the "Third Age" of JavaScript - TLDR: the arc of history is toward ES Modules, and polyglot tooling, like esbuild. Creating much faster dev tools and user experiences.
