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Alex Russell

These folks can't be serious thought leaders because they aren't in touch with reality outside the privilege bubble.

It's fine to ignore them. They haven't been right for a decade, and I think that's long enough.

10 comments
Alex Russell

Anyway, just a reminder to hire people to solve problems with HTML and CSS, not too make them with JS.

scops

@slightlyoff very good thread. i'm in a position to define frontend environments for our customers (local press mostly) for about a year. finally the first one will get a new page in january with css/html first and minimal - weight light self developed - javascript framework (~ 10 kb with modules on demand if needed) :) the team before me cluttered all with npm/webpack/stimulus/... a real hell...

Alex Russell

@scops You had me at "css/html first"! Bravo.

William Pietri

@slightlyoff I totally agree with the theory here. I'm starting a new project soon. Do you have recommendations for resources with a practical vision that I can share with colleagues?

Alex Russell

@williampietri I am working on one. When do you need it?

William Pietri

@slightlyoff Personally, the sooner the better. But don't sweat that too much. We'll get by.

Bee O'Problem

@slightlyoff Javascript is like regex.

Try to solve a problem with JS... now you have two problems.

🪐

@slightlyoff

Those folks you want to ignore seem to be the people who are getting paid well, so people learning for vocational purposes are going to follow the practices of these "not serious thought leaders" because learning fundamentals of HTML and CSS won't be enough to get hired and spending time practicing these skills will delay new developers from getting hired.

Only the people who have made a living and established a reputation in the field who then put in the effort on their own to practice the skill of reducing JS computational costs on user devices can try to sell the value of those skills. That value might not be as high as initially intuited, since saving well off users with the newest hardware computational cycles can be effectively zero and many businesses' revenues are disproportionately dependent on those well off users.

This is an externalities problem much the way pollution is an externalities problem. In the same way, shaming and finger wagging isn't going to have an effective influence on those whose livelihoods are tied to taking advantage of the externalities. Solutions for externalities problems require collective action, which almost always means regulations and taxes (but not always!).

I don't think people are anywhere close to organizing action on this particular externalities problem. But what could help to that end is good descriptions of the problem and good examples of the alternative methods. Please continue providing more of both.

@slightlyoff

Those folks you want to ignore seem to be the people who are getting paid well, so people learning for vocational purposes are going to follow the practices of these "not serious thought leaders" because learning fundamentals of HTML and CSS won't be enough to get hired and spending time practicing these skills will delay new developers from getting hired.

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