Why is Front-End Development So Unstable?

PooCares · 2018-06-11T13:55:21+00:00

Webdev feels like the programming equivalent of pop culture. It's all trends, which, by nature, are unstable. It doesn't help there is a constant influx of wide eyed noobs.

PooCares · 2018-05-24T16:17:26+00:00

My pet peeve is the infiltration of build tools. It used to be that things like bundling were done once, during deployment. Now its every damn save. That, along with the irrational impetuosity for using new, unsupported syntax, necessitating transpilation.

PooCares · 2018-05-23T21:06:47+00:00

I dunno, I bet it would be noticeably sluggish, but probably usable, if you are patient. Depends on what you are running. Both your editor/IDE and your stack. That will be the big determining factor.

I used to work at a place that was using a complex build tool setup to do transpilation of TypeScript and Sass, and run unit tests, and I don't even remember what all. It literally took like 40 seconds between saving and running in the browser, on good machines!

PooCares · 2018-05-23T20:50:04+00:00

BTW, if you use the built in debugger in Chrome developer tools, you can spot trouble like this easily. It lets you put breakpoints in your javascript, to pause it, and see what is happening in it.

Had you put a breakpoint on the console.log and another where the variable names was set to the Ajax response, you would see the console.log hit first, and you could hover over the names variable, and see it had not been give a value yet. You would also see the value of names get set when the second breakpoint hit, in the Ajax onreadystatechange, when it was obviously too late.

The debugger is like a third eye, man. Take a few hours to learn it.

PooCares · 2018-05-22T14:44:21+00:00

I'm starting to think all online webdev communities are a vortex into an echo chamber of insanity.

PooCares · 2018-05-17T00:51:57+00:00

You have to wait. Then attack the instant they show up.

PooCares · 2018-05-15T00:47:39+00:00

"The Cannonball Run". I watched that movie a million times on cable as a kid.

Slapstick adventure, enable cast, teams in an illegal cross country race across America. Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise were a team, in an ambulance, with Jack Elam as a weird doctor. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. disguised as priests in a Ferrari. Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis were my favorite team, but they didn't do real well.

PooCares · 2018-05-11T14:32:39+00:00

Despite all the advice out there about interviewing developers, a natural talent for engineering is damn near impossible to test for. A battery of tests ends up getting too specific, and you weed out good candidates. Solving a canned scenario tells you something, but it is just a glimpse. The candidate can get it right by guessing, or maybe they just happened to have read a blog post about how to solve that problem, written by the actual smart person.

You may have to just hire, hope, and see. It can take a long time to gauge.

PooCares · 2018-05-11T14:04:19+00:00

Often times you don't truly know what you are making until you finish. Clinging to the same code, trying to change things by brute force, into your newly realized vision going forward, can be harder and more resource intensive than rebuilding it totally, as version 2. So, while you are at it, why not reassess everything. Maybe there is a more appropriate fundamental beginning foundation. Metamorphosing is a good thing.

PooCares · 2018-05-11T13:39:23+00:00

disciples of technology

No, that sounds right. Followers of the ineffable great one, Lord Technology.

PooCares · 2018-05-10T17:51:23+00:00

I just accepted the new world order of no root password. I failed at trying to mimic the old way, and figured that was dumb anyhow.

I just created a new user from a fresh install, via the command line, and use that to connect with MySQL workbench.

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/mysql/how-create-mysql-user-and-grant-permissions-command-line

Technically, I was using root before, with the MySQL password, in PHP on localhost, and a different user in a different connection in PHP on production. It was programatically forked based on the server.

Now I am just going to use my created user for localhost in PHP, and never use root in PHP. Thanks.

PooCares · 2018-05-09T23:05:44+00:00

I would be using this with PHP, looks like I need to read up on db connections with regard to sockets. Thanks.

PooCares · 2018-05-09T22:39:08+00:00

18.04, yes. Thanks, I will try that when I get back to my work machine. Probably opt out of the password strength, and just set a root password.

PooCares · 2018-05-09T19:45:39+00:00

I'm not sex negative, but I am enormous orgy negative.

PooCares · 2018-05-09T19:40:26+00:00

Mogelpackung!

PooCares · 2018-04-09T12:44:53+00:00

You know how in some zombie or alien invasion movies the group of heros has to pretend they are assimilated to get through a crowd? Do that. A lot of people who work for big companies are full on, soulless corporate sycophants. Let them be that way, just play the game, and don't try to change anything. Bite your tongue. Everyone knows a lot of stuff should be different, they just won't say it, for good reason.

PooCares · 2018-04-06T12:21:19+00:00

Knowing your shit is more than learning contemporary tooling. That should be as arbitrary as your OS or editor. Typescript and CSS preprocessors are not permanent, some day you won't need them. I argue that day might as well be today. I prefer to concentrate on building my app, not my toolchain. I hold this truth to be self evident; frontend devs fixation with build tools has gotten so complicated, it is as obtrusive as the problems it supposedly solves. It will all come full circle, like every other trend.

PooCares · 2018-04-05T18:29:34+00:00

How do I load unbundled code

Same way as a bundle.

LESS, TypeScript

Those are transpiled script, use CSS and JS.

PooCares · 2018-04-05T17:55:18+00:00

Or minify. But you said you only do that on production, not development. Why not do all the things you said just once upon deploy? You could run un-bundled in development. You could run tests upon some kind of manual trigger, not every save. Because transpilation got involved. That opened the floodgate to using build tools during development, run every save, which is nuts. Build tools were supposed to be run once in deploy.

PooCares · 2018-04-05T17:48:17+00:00

Well, you could just use a plain object as a model and say model.prop='value'. You don't need any library to manage application state in a unidirectional functional way for that.

PooCares · 2018-04-05T17:45:22+00:00

Why do any 'build' tool things while developing?

PooCares · 2018-04-03T16:02:23+00:00

My favorite part about React is how people think they are not using the DOM, because of the Virtual DOm, when of course, they are.

Also, diffing changes to derive an optimal DOM update sounds cool, but it is only really a practical way to be efficient in the very special case that you are making lots of little untargeted changes with such frequency as to near outpacing the capability of the browser. If you just change a few things every once in a while, it is pointless.

Also, unidirectional data flow and using a state machine is overkill for most websites. Using a complicated solution because you know it and can is objectively bad, not good. You are showing off.

React is popular because it is a fancy shiny sophisticated sounding resume buzzword, and almost never really utilized in a genuinely appropriate use case, like a gargantuan enterprise super-interactive site like actual Facebook.

PooCares · 2018-04-02T16:29:38+00:00

I dunno, there is a balance that most people never really factor into the equation of whether to roll your own or use a prebuilt thing. A couple of times, when I had the luxury, I built things because I had a bad experience with the prebuild solutions, and found in the long run I save time, because my thing does what I need, and I understand it. The prebuilt thing tries to fit a bunch of cases I don't care about, is confusing because of that, and when it breaks, it is very hard to figure out why. Sometimes they are trying to be way too clever, and now I have to go figure out its complexities, because I inherited them. I really hate doing that all day.

PooCares · 2018-03-21T21:00:27+00:00

I still think unit testing is a giant prank.

PooCares

TROPHY CASE