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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

If you can have a Java backend that's more or less totally decoupled from the frontend, great. Java and it's tooling are fine, and it's easy to be productive writing in Java. However, my only experience as a frontend dev with Java backend system has been truly nightmarish, because the backend processed all the frontend assets and rendered them. If anything, this is what helped me burnout, because everyone on my team writing Java was super productive and delivered on time, while I couldn't test my JS, CSS, or HTML changes without restarting Tomcat on my fucking useless 10lb HP laptop that the corp required me to use most of the time, because that's what all the Java developers used to get their Java working.

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Yeah so the dev machine shit specs is something we fight SO HARD against in my bank. There s not many thing we can fight, but our 10 core SMT xeon with 128G of RAM for everyone in the team was a fight worth fighting. Yes, it took 2 years of them putting us on a new VM cloud systems after another before they gave up, us spamming them every say "intellij freezes", "I cant build in less than 10 minutes and the traders are getting nervous we spend our time daydreaming while it compiles" and other such trolls making the budget monkeys sweat.

Other than that, there s probably a way for you to propose a change, ive worked on the same nightmare you describe and, well, I was lucky enough I guess I could make enough changes to both stack it was possible to get either a light java subset running just the frontend to test, or make the js independent for testing, yes with a yarn soup lol, which is how I learned it in the first place I guess.

I remember 6 years ago working on financial company. We have to deploy our app into weblogic and everytime we have to change something, we have to recompile it again and restart the app server. It took almost 5 - 10 minutes from start to ready to test. I thought that's because of the code but turns out all of our notebooks are using shit HDD. When I use my own PC with SSD, it flies with less than 3 minutes and after that I proposed something like hot reload which make the dev experience a lot nicer (in some cases, you do need to restart)

I don't know about them right now but before I resign, I told them "have you ever calculate how much time and money wasted by just restarting our app server for local dev? you probably should be worry about that because I believe you pay us to wait for app server comes online more than we develop a feature"

In retrospect, I hadn't thought of that but it makes perfect sense. I believe I ended up accessing my laptop's local server from my personal mac, so it would have still been the bottleneck. I may have asked a similar question on my way out lol

If you are using IntelliJ, do not use the JBR JDK 11 as the boot JDK for the IDE. Since I switched to Azul Zulu 15, IntelliJ flies.

I'm glad you won the fight you were fighting. I lost most of mine, and this was 5 years ago.

A few things worth elaborating on.

> 10 core SMT xeon with 128G of RAM for everyone in the team In our case, most frontend web devs realistically use macOS or some other unix env. Not only did our bunk-ass windows machines suck spec-wise, and in terms of physical dimensions, they also sucked because they were windows based. This was shortly before WSL, so it was a pain. The DevOps guy did have a crazy machine with tons of ram and so on.

> I cant build in less than 10 minutes This was literally the case for me every time I made a change. Sometimes the previous result would be cached and I'd need to do it again. I was constantly fighting a stupid battle, and nobody really understood why things were the way they were or how to change them, including the java devs that had been working on it for years.

I kind of won the dev machine battle, because the VPN wasn't really sophisticated and I just set up some system on my personal mac, against the wishes of management. When a designer came in, they got a mac, and had to ask me how to connect it to the VPN.

> it was possible to get either a light java subset running just the frontend to test, or make the js independent for testing, yes with a yarn soup lol

Someone had set up a node instance that attempted to replicate the output of the java system, but without some bits that I can't recall atm. The inconsistencies and trying to maintain a one-for-one replica was just as much of pain. If I remember correctly, that was in part because there would really have had to have been a deliberate time investment in creating a sustainable replica that involved communication when any data changed server side. It was a crap-shoot, and I should give myself more credit for lasting as long as I did, but less credit for not jumping ship way earlier.

I ended up literally burning out, getting fired, and didn't find employment again for years. I have it on my resume that I did a few things successfully while I was there, but quite honestly I don't completely remember what those were, and am just guessing at this point.

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