I work on a product that is so loved and hated at the same time. With some people it’s almost set off its own subculture, and they will roll with nostalgia if they ever used it.
On the other hand some other people will claim it’s the hallmark of enshittification, overchurned with features and a sinking mess.
I agree with both. It’s a strange situation and very difficult to move the needle towards more love at this point
There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ
Production-grade web app without advanced build tools? Depends.
CSS classes not scoped and starting to leak?
You hire more frontend developers and because there is no type system we get critical exceptions?
And no automated testing to discover them?
Correctly handling hyphenation of user-generated content? Safari decided to handle audio differently in the latest version and you have no polyfills?
iPhone decided to kill the tab because of memory pressure, because someone uploaded an image with exotic properties, and you have no cdn service like fastly image optimiser to handle that?
Support for right to left languages such as Arabic?
The backend returned a super cryptic response that actually originates from the users private firewall?
a11y requires you to use resizable browser text, and someone is using google translate chrome extension at the same time, and you can’t possibly know how the layout of the page will look like?
Some Samsung devices bypass browser detection completely and you don’t know if the user is on mobile or not? localStorage.setItem will throw an error when the device is low on memory, etc etc…
Once you get to a certain scale of users, even the simplest of tasks become littered with corner cases and odd situations. For smaller scale applications, it is not necessary to have a very wide tool arsenal. But if you are facing a large user-base, you need quite some heavy caliber tools to keep things in check.
I understand that this is intended as a rant - but these types of “case studies”, where someone starts a personal hobby project as a solo developer without using modern frameworks - are not very convincing. It would be an entirely different argument to point to a blog post of a larger organisation justifying their tech stack than these types of sources, that seem to be more common these days. Often the author is a backend developer who lacks any detailed knowledge of the problem space, and the comments section is usually full of fact errors and confusion.
I don't get the impression the author (of this post, or most others like it) is saying this approach should necessarily be used for complex apps in large organizations. The opposite, rather; that when working solo on hobby projects, modern frameworks are often unnecessary, and foregoing them can be more fun and productive than one might expect.
The "detailed knowledge of the problem space" appears to me to be "detailed knowledge of the hammers in use", not necessarily the problems these hammers once solved.
Often I find that the common web app needs nothing more than a few dozen helper js functions.
Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I haven’t been working on any sort of crazy features with elements moving around the page or excessive Ajax components (do they still call it that!?). On the other hand, most sites don’t have these features.
> Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I agree. A framework forces a shared consensus on how to solve a particular set of problems.
A single competent engineer on their own can make that consensus themselves. If the system is larger than a single competent engineer can manage, it seems intuitive that a small handful of engineers who are familiar with working with each other are less dependent on a framework for shared consensus.
Construction industry. I'm having an upcoming project with making a web based 3d editor now, and before that I had an open offer for another construction industry 3d app. I also have a close friend who just finished a gig in the same line
Really interesting to hear that my experience is shared by any. I wrote my master thesis on rdf and linked data and the more I got into it the more I realize how it's just a collection of people praising each other's ideas without any outward potential.
In theory the idea is brilliant but the execution is poor. In many cases the world of academia is way too detached from software development to be able to produce any real-world useful tooling beyond toy projects and proof-of-concepts.
You can get the same functionality by using an existing state manager, a socket library, and your own tree diffing algorithm. This is just a baked pie ready to eat, along with some syntax sugar :)
Here is a very simple example usage: https://github.com/mstdokumaci/stx-vue-example
I get the picture, looks really useful. Maybe the tagline "Batteries included data structure / state manager." Could be something more like "minimal web socket synchronized state manager" or something like that.
On the other hand some other people will claim it’s the hallmark of enshittification, overchurned with features and a sinking mess.
I agree with both. It’s a strange situation and very difficult to move the needle towards more love at this point
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