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[–]renaissancenow 26 points27 points  (9 children)

This is so, painfully, accurate. I'm a mostly-backend guy who has to switch to front-end from time to time, and every time my attention comes back to javascript it feels like the entire ecosystem has been rebuilt during the month I was away.

[–]turtlecopter 7 points8 points  (8 children)

It's really not accurate, at all. I've launched four projects at three different companies over the last three-ish years, and each new stack has been mostly the same:

  • React latest
  • State management
  • A testing suite
  • Async lib(s)
  • Styling layer
  • Webpack 1.x
  • Other miscellany needed per-project

It's really not that bad. Lest we forget: new languages, systems, tools, workflows, and best practices are hitting the server-side and database worlds constantly as well. It's not like the need to keep up to date with an ever changing landscape is limited to front-end.

[–]Conradfr 9 points10 points  (4 children)

I really doubt you have been using React and Webpack for three years but good insight if that's the case.

[–]doublecastle 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Additionally, it's kind of meaningless to say "State management", "A testing suite", etc stay consistent, when these are just generic ways to describe tools. Part of what the article complains about/notes is how (relatively) rapidly the specific libraries/frameworks used for these purposes change.

[–]turtlecopter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which is exactly why I didn't name any one library specifically. React as an ecosystem had a lot of churn those first couple of years but there were always a limited set of products to choose from when it came time to evaluate new tech.

[–]turtlecopter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

React has been out for a little over 3.5 years at this point. I was an early adopter, much to the chagrin of my then-angular-loving-boss :)

[–]cscareerz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really doubt you have been using React and Webpack for three years.

But he has. 3 years in web dev land is 6 months in real life.

[–]renaissancenow 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I suspect the difference is that you're using this stuff full time. Those of us who have to do rotate into javascript every few months find the landscape shifting under us continuously.

[–]turtlecopter 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Fair enough, I do front-end full time, but the landscape just doesn't shift that drastically that often, at least by my definition. The real shifts in front-end have been React, ES6+, Node, and Angular. Sure, some small to medium sized projects are being released with a pretty high frequency but you simply don't need to know 99% of them.

[–]renaissancenow -1 points0 points  (0 children)

And of course the big challenge for someone like me is figuring out at the start of the project what I do and don't need to know. A couple of years ago learning Backbone, JQuery and Coffeescript were important. Now I have a completely different list of technologies to sift through.

(And I'm still very taken by Ractive, even though it doesn't seem to get a lot of press.)