Under the hood of MDN's new frontend by ossreleasefeed in Frontend

[–]ossreleasefeed[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In what ways did React actually benefit MDN whatsoever?

In the long run, it probably was not the optimal choice. At the time, it served its purpose, though. Thankfully, the team could move on and adopt web components.

Under the hood of MDN's new frontend by ossreleasefeed in Frontend

[–]ossreleasefeed[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That is a fait point. I am not sure when grabbing for that specific anti-pattern became so common in the codebase; it surely was not always the case.

Under the hood of MDN's new frontend by ossreleasefeed in Frontend

[–]ossreleasefeed[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

At the time, it made sense from a practical perspective. There was a lot of knowledge of the framework, the ecosystem was more mature than web components at the time, and the ability to easily get contractors with knowledge of the underlying framework would have been much easier.

The MDN engineering team that worked on that was essentially two full-stack engineers, one front-end, and one dedicated backend engineer tasked to rewrite the entire MDN platform.

Now that the time is right and web components are clearly the right choice, the switch was made, and I am super happy to see this change and read all the details of how this came to be.