A Rant about Front-end Development - eviltoast
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views expressedRead More

A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.

Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    6 months ago

    thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most

    and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?

    but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over

    • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      praise the circumstances that enable the scourge of b2b saas products imposed on employees at the collaboration factory

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        6 months ago

        if we keep this up, the CEO might positively mention the name of our project briefly during an all-hands, then two weeks later vastly reduce our headcount because the good job we’ve done proves we don’t need to waste money on all these developers

        • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          8·
          6 months ago

          I remember when we used to write our name in our css files because we wanted to, not because our ssh key enforced it for auditability

          • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
            7·
            6 months ago

            I know this sounds like old man shit, but I’ll die on this hill. It’s a significant fundamental attitude shift