Gregory's ServerDoes anybody else feel like they're relearning web development? Once you decide you wanna get off the The Frontend Treadmill, you realize you need to completely reorient your process for building web sites and applications. I think all of the tools and practices that you reach for need to change pretty significantly. It feels like starting over.
https://polotek.net/posts/the-frontend-treadmill/
 13 comments
But once you decide "I'm not gonna install vite", you're left with a pretty big void. What do we do instead? What's the way to start a project after you've made the key decision that you're going to stick close to web standards and low JavaScript solutions? And how do you set things up so that you can thoughtfully expand into js solutions in the future as needed, but without making a mess of things? Also, CSS is completely different than it was even 5 years ago. I feel like I'm relearning it quite literally. All of the syntax and constructs are familiar. So I'm not starting from scratch. But I wouldn't solve anything in CSS the same way we used to solve it 10 years ago. There are way better tools that are less hacky and more performant. But we're gonna have to learn them. I suspect that getting off the treadmill also means committing to revisiting all of the development practices we've so painstakingly developed over the last 5-10 years. That's going to suck. If I was putting my manager hat on, I would say that we need to see this as a choice invest in a better future state. Because what I'm realizing is that in the short term, this transition is probably going to feel slower and more costly than the status quo. This is not a small thing. It's actually huge. Because even as we convince people that the current path is the wrong one, we have to contend with what it costs to change course. It means real, hard business conversations about when and how to pay that cost. For the record, I believe bundle and minify are still best practices in my mind. But I do think there are significant details that can shift. I think we're talking more about what JavaScript we're delivering in the bundles. I don't have strong recommendations yet. This thread is me realizing that I don't. But I will say that @b0rk convinced me that esbuild is simple and has nice defaults.  @polotek If it helps, I highly recommend using lightweight CSS support frameworks. Something like bootstrap. It helps provide some initial structure and tools and a launching point without boxing you in.  @polotek A few years ago, a friend wrote that he didn’t feel he had twenty years of web design experience; rather, he felt like he had five years of experience, four times. I think about that a lot.  @polotek Do you have an answer to that? I tend to use vue2 because the reactivity system saves me time (I think haha) for big solo dev apps. I managed to avoid a build system for a pretty large app but it got pretty messy eventually and I did wish I had a system to bundle and minify. Maybe http2 removes some of the bundling benefits (although multiple round trips for small files seems bad). Haven't jumped into web components yet haha |
Just as an example, I find that I can't even get started in the same way. For a long time now, setting up a new project meant installing a build chain. Webpack, create-react-app, esbuild, vite. Whatever thing is in fashion at the time. But the first thing you do is make a bunch of assumptions about your development environment.
But what we're realizing is that those assumptions lock us into a particular path. And we're realizing that we may want to have other paths available to us.