Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

This guy is a snake oil salesman most likely. This is an utterly contrived and overly complicated setup to run a personal site / signup form for paid lessons. Any experienced engineer worth their salt will eye roll at this but I know junior engineers who would just eat this up.

"Hi, I'm Kent C. Dodds. I'm a world renowned speaker, teacher, and trainer ..." - https://kentcdodds.com/info World renowned is an extreme stretch. I have never heard of this guy, so if he is even renowned, it is only in the frontend JS world.

https://kentcdodds.com/discord#reasons-to-join While I personally like Discord, I have become extremely wary of people with something to sell advertising a Discord server. You see the same tactic with the crypto and NFT people, where you create what feels like an informal, fun, collaborative space, but really it is an attempt to create a self-sustaining social scene around a specific brand.

Then onto his LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentcdodds/). He worked at Paypal for a while, preceded by a bunch of no names, and has some weird Google developer certification. Not really the resume of someone who can charge $600 (!) for a course in some frontend BS that will be out of date in 6 months.

His Github has a ton of activity and to his credit it does look to actually largely be "real" and not just gamifying LOC/# of commit metrics.

This guy may well be a react/frontend expert, or at least competent in the space, but this website is just a grift targeting inexperienced engineers.

Well, here’s the thing, the pragmatic developer is not his market. It’s the newbies or those who are deeply associating their new career with the identity of a ‘legit’ developer. This is the group that will pay him.

It’s really none of my business, one can spend their time and money however they like. But, they do show up to work and advocate for these types of setups and that leads to bad codebases.

I’m not sure how any of us can solve it since Frontend is the port of entry for vast swaths of career-changers and new grads. Then again, I also see the over-engineering on devops, a group that should be a little more experienced. I don’t know where people get these ideas, so we might all be correct in shaking our fist at the Kent C Dobb types for fundamentally being a bad influence.

Just taking a look at one part of the stack, Xstate, how anyone can advocate for this is, I really just don’t know. This is a simple todo list example from it’s docs:

https://github.com/statelyai/xstate/tree/main/examples/todo-...

Eh, I give up. I really have no words for any of this.

You put into words my exact experience with his influence on someone in my team a while ago. It was exhausting to have someone add complexity to our react codebase i.e. through render props + “accessor pattern”. It had a significant cost in code reviews and refactors.

As a front-end myself with my share of experience (Senior-Staff level), I've found a way of answering this "I’m not sure how any of us can solve it" is by building credibility on yourself and on your tools. It's a bit of an uphill battle, but def doable.

When I build a small tool/webapp in 1-2 weeks, using "simple, dumb" technology (even within the React ecosystem), while some of my colleagues take 1+ month to build similarly complicated webapp, and after few months of usages there are 0 reported bugs in my apps and they are still cleaning edge cases.

Then I'm usually brought in to help on some of these projects, and most of my PRs look deep in the red (removing more lines than adding) while still adding features/fixing bugs. That shows part my experience, but also often the better use of the tools.

The problem is by the 3rd-4th project you are brought on to help, you pretty much become jaded. How many times can one deal with it without losing patience?

While this whole thread has been a whiplashing on the OP, it’s only happening because they seem to not get it and continue propagating stacks and layered complexity of this sort. In fact, they are literally selling it to the most impressionable without paying a dime of the consequences (suffering through the n-th over abstracted codebase).

I’ve lost patience.

I'm planning on replacing the TodoMVC example and use a more real-world example.

However, Kent is only using XState in one non-trivial interactive part of the site – the call recorder: https://github.com/kentcdodds/kentcdodds.com/blob/main/app/c...

Seems to me like a proper use of a state machine (I might be biased, though).

Kent C Dodds is well known in the JS community. I've heard great things about his testing libraries, but he has a weird "dev celebrity" thing going on (EDIT: which, btw, is not rare in the JS/React/Node world). I'm sure that's just necessary for marketing himself as an educator since that's his main source of revenue.

Kent is a great resource in the frontend community, giving a way tons of content for free, including several very popular open spurce libs. Nor sure why you’re being so negative towards somebody you obviously don’t know

Because every inch of this website is dripping with scummy MLM language around his courses and we as an industry have seen scams proliferate around preying on people trying to make it in tech. https://cryptobriefing.com/youtuber-techlead-accused-of-scam... for ex. It offends me morally.

Like, look at https://kentcdodds.com/clubs for example. Doesn't this read as patronizing at best and one step away from being a pyramid scheme at worst? All it takes is to add a financial incentive to the "Learning Club Captain" position for this to literally be a pyramid scheme.

There are thousands of people in his Discord going through his courses. He’s simply helping people form remote study groups, like students do in school.

Honestly, and I mean this as no insult: it sounds like you have been some kind of past bias/trauma on this subject or are else taking a really pessimistic view of these things.

Ultimately the courses this dude does are “produced” via EggHead.io and the guy has a well documented open source career.

And hey if his stuff doesn’t provide value to you that’s fine. It’s not hurting anyone and if anything is helping people with their careers.

P.S. I follow him on Twitter and he frequently offers discounts and purchase power parity. So it’s made about as financially accessible as reasonably possible.

Hope that helps.

But it also feels like there was a similar discussion on his other articles just a year ago on /r/reactjs, which I’m going to generalize and say might be less jaded than HNers:

https://reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/fcvqnl/stop_using_islo...

Many people picked on the distributed nature of the app, along with auth, but I was personally taken aback at the pushing of a pretty obscure, heavy handed state machine library in ‘modern frontend in 2021’, especially just as we are exiting the Redux era into more ergonomic solutions to state management.

There’s a lot of reasonable feedback here, and it all kind of falls under the theme that this guy is pushing a misguided curriculum. I’m not even a fan of Redux, but modest usage of the useSelector hook is far more sensible than xState (or even better, the myriad of newer alternatives that boil Redux down even more to something even simpler). This an important discussion to me personally because I always wonder how newer developers get these concepts fed to them, and voila, here it is.

It’s not hurting anyone and if anything is helping people with their careers.

Unfortunately, I think a good deal of working professionals on HN can agree that it is hurting our codebases, and the overall Frontend community has achieved consensus for some time now that we’ve been feeding bad guidance to everyone.

All I actually saw on his Twitter, and probably the Discord too (if I were to look), was a fanbase providing support. Objectively, all one can take away from that is that his paying customers like the product. That has no bearing on if the product is actually good, just that some people were either accurately or inaccurately assessing the value of it. HN can certainly be full of haters, but it does have a pretty solid group of shrewd experienced developers that won’t appease and ordain things indiscriminately. In this case, as tough as the feedback was, I think HN got it right.

> the myriad of newer alternatives that boil Redux down even more to something even simpler)

Going on a tangent here, could you suggest any notable library replacing redux to look at?

https://github.com/arnelenero/simpler-state

But there are many, I’m doing them an injustice by not mentioning them. Recoil is another that came from the Facebook team. A lot of thought went into simplifying state management.

I've never used any of his educational content but some of his open source libraries are top notch. Some of his blog posts have been influential and very pragmatic/sane.

You may be right about the selling tactics but the ad hominems are in comically poor taste.

No, this isn't it. What he did was basically build a production-ready webapp for his own personal blog. Was this overkill? Maybe. But when you're used to work in that kind of prod environment, you want to reproduce it when building any other projects. So I think this isn't so much a snake oil salesman crap but more about the current lack of good solution to get this kind of environment ready in a few clicks.

I thought it was just a parody

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