I’ve been dipping my toes into NextJS, Vercel, PlanetScale, and other serverless / edge providers, and there’s so many terms / concepts thrown my way that I feel overwhelmed a lot of the time.
I mean, I’m already a web developer well versed with React, and I love my SPA setup with Vite, so for others outside the web dev space, this must be a nightmare to keep up with.
Was curious to hear your thoughts on the rapidly evolving space of web dev.
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About ten years ago, I was getting stressed out about it. Someone told me:
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Stick to what you know well, if it will do what you want the end user won’t care.
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If what you know won’t do what you want, find the thing that will do what you want and just focus on that. No need to go down a million rabbit holes.
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If your team is using something you don’t know, learn that and just focus on that and ask for help if you get lost.
I’ve found this advice to be extremely useful.
I’m managing some devs right now, one of whom is going really slowly. She’s determined to do her part of the project in React. I said to her “How comfortable are you in React.” She said “Not really, I’m totally new to it. I’ve used Angular in the past and React is really different.” I said “Why aren’t you doing your part of the project in Angular?” She had no good answer.
I feel like when you’re managing a team you also have to consider the skills you want future devs to have to have. Not saying this is necessarily the case for you (for all I know you already have a mix of React and Angular), but on my teams we have bottlenecks when we need to do work in certain plugins because only one person knows VB6, or WPF, or has the license for the third party library needed to compile the plugin. The dev may not be available for weeks/months because other teams need work done in that tech. If everyone’s using the same stack you can just assign tasks to people based on their availability.
I feel like when you’re managing a team you also have to consider the skills you want future devs to have to have.
I fully agree.
This particular case is a startup in a very sensitive area rushing to MVP that has chosen to imbue it’s devs with a lot of autonomy and build a distributed infrastructure where they treat each other as black boxes. This decision was made before me, not that I necessarily agree or disagree, it’s mostly working, but I’m struggling to get everyone to document their shit and I’m concerned about bus factor and replacing people / maintaining these systems in the future.
Anyway, I think that was her thinking when she chose React (wanting to learn it) but her progress has been underwhelming at the last few standups (she’s built very little while the rest of the team is rocketing along). She’s built so little in the last three weeks that she even agreed (today) that pivoting to Angular makes sense. We’ll see if she can catch up.
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I do keep up with modern web development but that tends to be changes to things like CORS, client hints, things like that. I never used JavaScript and am never gonna start.
Development is much more simple and stable, and the user experience is far superior, when you cut out JavaScript.
Svelte is where the fun is 🙂
We have a guy doing svelte on my team and it looks great, I’m just hoping it’s not going to be a blocker down the road when we need more people. Is it popular these days?
Yes, even Apple has been hiring Svelte developers for 4 or so years
When I start to feel overwhelmed, I just go check the Days since the last new JavaScript framework counter.
Usually calms me down.
I gave up when back in the day, we had like JQuery, AngularJS, Vue.js, React.js, and so forth and so I just stick with JQuery for better or worse for most of my professional career in ASP.Net Core development. (CDN alleviate the trouble of distributing JQuery and web browser would cache it, so I don’t put much stock on people claiming that it’s bloated or heavy.)
I often bring up that we just needed better GUI toolkit with a designer and to replace all of HTML/JS/CSS with just WebASM and WebGPU. Rather than supporting legacy crappy unholy trinity languages, we could push for “survival of the fittest” languages/tools to fill into this space.
I used to keep up but eventually just burned out. I do plenty at work so if I do have a hobby project in mind, I tend to do something other than just webdev, to spite it up a little bit.
It does feel scary sometimes just how quickly you can get outdated, especially with frontend. I want to stick to backend but it feels like all the fancy jobs eventually end up with 90% work being on front, APIs and DB seem like the easiest part of it all (especially if managed properly)
I’m in a very similar boat as you, and I often feel frustrated with how much there is I’m not keeping track of. But I don’t really like coding side projects in my free time, so I just learn as deeply as I can about the frameworks my works teams are using. It tends to pay off insofar as people can usually tell that I’ve done research, so at the very least it helps me less less insecure…
My current open source project is a programming language engine, which I implemented in Kotlin and compile to the JVM, Native as well as JS. That means I can run the JS version in a browser, but I don’t have to deal (much with JS itself). The actual web UI is very minimal, because developing for the web is, as you correctly asserted, a nightmare.
Fireship on YouTube gives my regular dose of new frameworks and similar developments. Apart from that not really.
