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I think this sort of thing, while cheesy in some respects is great for the team morale. A lot of companies do social things, which is great, but they are disconnected from the work. It's like stop work, do something social, and back to work. But with this ritual it's connected and a real celebration.

I hope React is better for you and you don't need to burn again in 5 years! Luckily hooks and non-hooks code works together nicely enough.

Employees of the Chinese company Hayer famously smashed really dodgy and low quality fridges their company had produced in the 1980s as the symbolic start to a new dedication to quality.

See https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/how-china-fr... for one write-up.

> Teetering on the brink of collapse, the collective enterprise had gone through three managing directors in 1984 when Mr Zhang, a 35-year-old city manager, was appointed as the fourth.

> No one expected much of him, since a revolving door of directors had failed to stop the rot. He put it thus:

> People didn’t have faith in the factory.

> But he grabbed the national headlines a year later, upon discovering from a check on the inventory that a fifth of the fridges were faulty.

> Each fridge was worth two years of a worker’s pay, but Mr Zhang ordered the workers to destroy those 76 fridges – with a sledgehammer.

The CEO joined in the smashing as well for extra symbolism.

Love the story. The company is spelled "Haier" by the way, if you are interested in reading more about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier

Which itself is a bad Latin transliteration of the second half of a bad Chinese transliteration of the German brand name "Liebherr", so I think they'll forgive the misspelling.

Thanks! I had fixed it first, but then must have screwed it up again in editing.

Just in case anyone wonders if they got away from the brink of collapse or if they only smashed fridges:

> (The young manager) made it China’s version of the American appliance giant (General Electric)

Wow

Samsung's Lee Kun-hee did this as well, in the 90s I think, but he made the factory workers watch while he and the other board members smashed stuff and set it on fire.

Agreed. I've always found the group social stuff to be contrived because the work is the only thing I have in common with most folks at work. That's not to say I haven't made friends through work but it's always been isolated and organic.

This reminds me of one time when I finally got to shut down a particularly hated internal web app. For a few hours before the PHP server was taken offline, visiting the site would only return this image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OWKZqvvPh8/UjBJ6xPxwjI/AAAAAAAAO...

That's awesome. What made the app so hated?

I'm going to make an assumption that it was a PHP app written internally by people that didn't know what they were doing, with no documentation, and that was fragile as all hell. Also probably written in some ancient php version that could not be upgraded and was a huge security risk.

At least that's what I tend to see in the field.

Check, check, and check. Add to that no version control, no tests, no development environment, a custom ajax frontend framework, and the fact that it was mission critical. About the only thing it had going for it was daily database backups (which came in handy).

I did my best to clean up the code so it was at least somewhat maintainable, but there were sections (the most important ones, of course) that I just wouldn't touch because it was impossible to tell what they did -- oh yeah, I forgot to mention the global variables, didn't I?

So happy that app is dead and buried.

That is some Silkwood Shower shit.

We had a similar situation but with an ASP application that got rewritten from scratch in PHP instead. It's still running fine after 10 years without any big bugs. We didn't even get access to the sourcecode so it was all new bugs instead but at least it wasn't a big security hole whose database got wiped every week because of Bobby Tables. It had daily backups though that came in handy every week :-)

We have a support contract for an app like that...

On the bright side, using it to learn refactoring and migration techniques.

I have one like that. It was written by interns. One day I swear I will be able to get rid of it!

Brilliant

Every since The Crown S4, I've lots of references flying around. I must say that she was superbly played by Gillian Anderson.

> Every since The Crown S4, I've lots of references flying around. I must say that she was superbly played by Gillian Anderson.

Whut? That seems a complete non sequitur, am I missing something, or are you replying to the wrong thread?

When Margaret Thatcher died there was a push to get that song to the top of the charts. It entered at #2

Thank you for explaining.

The chain of associations here was a bit longer than usual: Image Meme > Song Title > Prominent Death > Political Figure > Recent Dramatization > Actor in Role

That's about as complex as your average bilingual pun!

Have you started on the Reactocalypse effort yet?

Everything needs to be rewritten in phoenix live view now.

No no no it's all about Svelte now /s

I swear, front end just invents this stuff to keep us all confused :(

s/confused/employed

Here I am server side PHP and vanilla JS, one or two RiotJS components. LOB apps tho - different game I guess

I have to say, Phoenix Liveview is one of the most exciting things to me, although it's not a match for what I'm working on right now. But my previous job it would have been a perfect fit (a big SPA for monitoring a bunch of IoT devices that had web socket connections to a backend). We were two frontenders and two backenders and we spent so much time implementing and maintaining, not to mention _arguing_ over the API between the SPA and the backend, and that API would've basically gone away if we'd used Phoenix Live. I really hope to get to use it at some point.

Thanks for making reference to LiveView. It reads a lot like Microsoft Blazor with server side rendering and two way communication through SignalR.

Not gonna lie, I've been waiting for that to start to seem like a good idea. :) React seems to have more staying power than previous trends, though. Off the top of my head, the frontend library supremacy* went something like:

- 2008 to 2012: Jquery

- 2012 to 2014: Backbone

- 2014 to 2016: Angular

- 2016 to present: React

And although there are serious contenders, React still seems like it has a solid lead over all others. If it lasts another couple years, it's been the dominant tool for longer than most.

* Based entirely on "what I was hearing the most about at that time," not on any rigorous methodology. There was still plenty of Jquery code being written last year and there are large, mature codebases out there in Backbone and Angular.

> there are large, mature codebases out there in Backbone and Angular.

When it comes to large long-historied Angular codebases, I prefer the term "metastasized" over "mature," though now that we're in the 2020s we can almost use "legacy."

You know what's funny? When I was finishing a Backbone.js job (circa 2014? I can't recall) I looked at Angular and React and my conclusion, based on thought and research, was that while React looked better in the moment Angular was conceptually superior and would be the future (or the future would be something like Angular but better).

That was really a thing I thought, I posted it too and people were like "hmm yes good point."

I know I've been wrong before and since but for whatever reason that one stuck with me as a humbling moment, I had it all backwards.

Hey I was certain that the iPad would be a flop too and that one year from the release nobody would talk about it ...

I've been wrong about every US Presidential election since 2000! That takes special talent.

So next time tell us who you see win, then we'll know the opponent will win! :)

As an atheist I realize this makes absolutely zero sense, but I can't help but feel that "abusing" the power in such a way would somehow "jinx" it and cause it to backfire!

The core React design pattern is nice, and the community is great, but the noise in the code.

What do you mean by noise?

Sh*t that sounds nice, but when stretched outside the simple documentation, has no purpose or meaning and ruins your life.

I’m looking at you -> { blah && }

What's the matter with that notation? I work in a code base many millions of lines large, see those every day, and think nothing of it.

The noise is the code.

Play the spaces between the notes.

Old school Perl coder here - rolling my eyes... ;-)

The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

Talk to a sendmail v8 admin who had to hand edit sendmail.cf rewrite rules.

With or without m4?

Without m4. You'll likely speak to a gibbering mess though.

I’m triggered.

This is just personal opinion: The one-way flow has made functional React components very noisy in terms of state and effects management.

For examples, here's a comparison implementing the same functionality using React hooks and Svelte: https://github.com/joshnuss/react-hooks-in-svelte

Now, there are ways to handle all this with less code in React as well (for example, MobX), but the current de facto defaults with hooks and Redux create so. much. boilerplate. for. every. little. thing.

I like and use React on almost a daily basis but I'll admit it can definitely be overly verbose sometimes (at least WidgetFactoryFactory's aren't common like in some other languages). I know next to nothing about Svelte though, I'd be interested to see how it compares to React in a complex app and what the big tradoffs are.

I think it's safe to say React wins on ecosystem but loses on verbosity w.r.t Svelte.

I keep wondering what everyone is going to complain about when it becomes clear React and Vue & a couple other decade old offerings are what everyone in JS land is using. The jokes about new JS frameworks being invented daily have started to fall off already. Stagnancy & ossification are setting in. Although functional components in React have, fairly recently, re-simplified/re-writeen the DX again.

Backbone was the first time there was framing at all. So long ago & so not that long ago!

The frontend world is maturing!

I remember having similar complains in the smaller rails world about a decade ago: every 6-12 months there'd be a new community-favorite gem to accomplish X, where X is any number of common needs: file upload, auth, json serialization, background jobs, etc etc. It was damn frustrating. I had the early-rails equivalent of js framework fatigue! But after a while it quieted down. I wouldn't call it stagnancy and ossification - I'd call it maturity and stabilization. :)

I was in those same trenches and I have the same scars. However... IIRC the difference between JS fatigue and magpie development with Gems (ooh! Shiny!) is that switching to the latest and greatest gems was usually painless. If you were willing to learn yet another DSL. With JS you have to throw everything away and start over with each new thing. But maybe Im just wearing ruby-tinted glasses. I actually liked the energy of the ruby community back then. But with JS I feel like it’s the blind leading the blind with the confidence of a used car salesman.

I like the term “magpie development”.

React has staying power this time, thank God. It's almost 8 years old and popularity is still increasing. Angular is dead to me though, which means big rewrites coming for me in the next few years...

Backbone never got really popular here (Sweden). I still see some legacy apps running Angular but React took over from jQuery quite fast in 2015 or so. What I have noticed thouhg is that people who like MVC-frameworks tend to like using libraries similar to Vue and those who have more of an application approach to web apps tend to like React. Personally I think I got a bad first impression from Vue and have had a hard time trying to get to like it (I know it is popular). I think libraries such as Svelte and dev environments similar to Snowpack will gain traction the coming years. Focus on Developer Experience and doing the heavy lifting in the dev environment.

you forgot prototype before jquery

And script.acoulo.us! What a duo they were. Actually I just checked and scrip.acoulou.us site is still alive, with last version from Dec 2010 :)

Oh my god, the flashbacks!

Circa 2005 doing client work during summers off of uni in this newfangled “Ruby on Rails” (v0.8.x). I was new to all of it. Coming from Flash/Flex/AS and jumping both feet into Ruby, Rails, JS via Script.aculo.us! Great times!

I use the browser extension Wappalyzer, which tries to detect the tech used in every site, and you would be surprised how many use the duo :)

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about prototype! I also used Dojo heavily at one of my college internships. Ancient history in javascript-land. :)

Dojo[0] actually reinvented itself to be a full VDOM react-like framework, focused on enterprise

[0]https://dojo.io/

And yahoo!

Seems they also had the good luck to have missed out on jQueryMobile too...

:shudder:

(I did make a bunch of money with that one project that went live for about 8 days before the company we did it for sold out and the new owners shut it down immediately. _So_ glad I was never on the hook for production support on that...)

prototype was horribly named. I was just becoming aware of prototypal inherence and it was so confusing because search results mostly pointing to the prototype library.

mootools, anybody??

You might be surprised how many sites are still using jquery..

Phoenix Live View pattern is where it's at now. So much better.

That timeline is missing vue and vanilla.js. Also, while personally I'm not a fan, Angular seems to continue to do well in "enterprise" projects where the web app isn't the main deliverable, and having a separate Node.js stack is undesired next to the Java or .net main backend stack.

We’ve done code burnings before. Throughout the year, any tech debt fixed or code repos removed could be printed out and burned in a bon fire at an annual gathering. Burning old chef code that made life pain every day? Put a smile on many faces haha.

We made a cake and stabbed it to death and then ate it.

When my team at a previous company finished a multi month migration of a large PHP app to the cloud we held a large deploy party where everyone gathered in a room and the CEO pressed a space bar labeled DEPLOY. A script ran, the load balancer config was upgraded and the whole team cheered for something ungraspable like this website in the cloud.

> In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages.

Pretty cool.

Did anyone beat the printer to death with a baseball bat?

I got your (Office Space) reference, but I’m thinking that beating older keyboards, mice and monitors to death may be more appropriate in this instance. Those monsters facilitated the creation of the code. They should die with the code.

I think it'd be hard for me to identify my "least favorite" area of codebase because I don't tend to get overly emotional about code.

If I did get emotional it'd only be due to some sort of bikeshedding (style complaints) that I would have forgotten about by the next morning anyways.

Congrats, robot human. Rejoice! You may exempt yourself from this extracorricular activity!

I heard of a team that did a similar thing;

Their app had some Norse name (something like Ragnarok or Valhalla etc) so the put it on an RC boat and torched it on a lake :-)

I'm curious, how many people got the reference to the first Burning Man, held on Ocean Beach in 1986?

Pretty similar! Fire and catharsis go hand in hand.