Google Web Starter Kit

Many people spend X hours a day obsessing about whether css-turd-polish.io is better than Sassy.js v4. If you spend those hours working on something productive, you're automatically ahead.

The framework churn is increasingly a perpetual motion machine for conference talks. Don't go to conferences and you won't feel like you're missing anything.

That doesn't mean you stop learning. It does mean you inject a slow low pass filter in your life and don't react to every little movement in technology. You can learn about them while realizing your end users don't care and, in general terms, these technologies have no material advantages in delivering what customers are after.

Engineers are not business people. Do no follow what someone with no business experience says because you'll find yourself jumping from tech to tech and no servicing your customers.

I'll note that plenty of these tools and libraries have been around longer than two years. If I remember correctly, Webpack came out in 2012 and React in 2013. I point out these two projects because they caused a fundamental shift in the way I approached web development, and neither is looking like it'll be going away soon.

My suggestion would be to try out create-react-app [0]. There's still some stumbling points, but it does a good job of showcases the general direction many people in the webdev development community have moved towards. It hides all the build stuff into a black box. As you become more comfortable with the ecosystem and the need arises, you can eject and access all these tools directly.

I totally agree that the webdev community should strive to do a better job at explaining the purpose of all these tools, but I don't think this problem is limited to them in the slightest. In fact, I can assure you I feel the exact same way you do when I look at many of these cloud / devops / server / backend tools.

Do I want chef, puppet, or ansible? Oh, but you need better dynamic configuration management and service discovery, so be sure to pick up consul or etcd. Remember KVM, jails, and vagrant? All those are dead, containers are the new hotness, say hello to Docker. If you wanna be web scale you'll really need Kubernetes, cuz you wanna be like Google, right? But also check out Deis or Flynn, so you can build your own cloud in the cloud. There's a few other HashiCorp products with nice-looking sites, but I don't even understand the problems they solve well enough to even try poking fun at em. Let's not forget databases! Remember MySQL? It cloned itself and changed its name to Maria. But it turns out that it totally sucks and everyone is using PostgreSQL. Those won't work if you're trying to be web scale, turns out RDBMs are a thing of the past, the future is all about NoSQL. Try out Mongo, it's so easy to use! But be sure to also check out Cassandra, CouchDB, and RethinkDB. They're all NoSQL, but different, but still the same [1]. If you're really set on being like Google, then CockroachDB is the only serious choice anyway. Is anything going slow? You'll have to add some caching with redis or memcached. It's time to jump on the real-time train too, so you'll need some pubsub magic, luckily you can use kafka, rabbitmq, or redis. I'll stop now, since I think this is already way too long. However, I'll note I didn't even mention big data, analytics, or monitoring.

[0] https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

[1] http://imgur.com/QXLL0XJ

In short, you're fine. Don't worry about it. Keep building things in jQuery. It works, there's plenty of documentation, and everyone's familiar with it.

I'd start here: https://github.com/verekia/js-stack-from-scratch

And then, once you've internalized what's going on here, break out create-react-app and just get to work.

One of them can only be driven if you control every single circuit manually, the next is missing an engine, and another has no windows, roof, doors, or seats.

Each of the tools would probably be useful for some purpose in a way, but with the entire toolbox of JS utils combined, it’s just a fractal of bad design.

On the other hand, you can look over into the JVM world, and, well it just works. There’s one option for dependency management and handling of compilation and preprocessing (gradle), you don’t have to handle any complicated libraries or anything, you can very easily add annotation processors or asset preprocessors as easily as adding a new dependency, and basically everything works natively together.

I want to add preprocessing so my JVM 8 code works on JVM 6 or later? I simply add the retrolambda preprocessor, and am done. One LOC.

Configuring Babel in the JS world, on the other hand, ends up with several hundred lines of webpack or grunt or gulp configs, you end up dealing with either merging all assets or using system js or whatever the latest fad is.

The JS world has recreated all the complexity of the JVM world, but worse.

Angular2 looks solid, but I'm happy with React despite the warts in the ecosystem.

But you can always use shrink-wrap or other package managers that guarantee immutability.

Oh, I guess I should say I love npm/yarn and use it as a core of all my projects. ️

You get everything you depend on, stuff it into a folder named third-party, and check it in forever (or until security bugs, features you need, etc). Include all and any licences, this is important.

When dealing with any software that's supposed to be our there for decades, the last thing you want it to have unplanned work because of missing libraries.

So the choice is either maintain a fork of every dependency or vendor them, and vendoring is considerably less painful imo.

(I'm not saying it's a good solution, mind you)

That way we can track and keep them in sync without having the problems you described.