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Comment by dgritsko | Hacker News Reader

I recently had a conversation with an "absolute beginner" and it was a stark reminder just how much knowledge I take for granted. It really is extremely challenging to try and build up a base of knowledge starting with no prior experience, and it's great to see examples of this done right.

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I find most of what I do in web dev to be trivial to the point of mind-numbing. People smarter than me from different fields try to do what I do and often have far more difficulty than I'd expect.

Job security for me until the ML engineers work out I can probably be mostly replaced by a smarter templating engine!

Modern web development is dumbed down by shared APIs abstracting most of the hard problems into patterns (arguably a good thing as there is way more consistency in web dev than infrastructure), but the concepts are still quite complex. Heck, React alone is a fairly complex piece of software that 90% of its users take completely foregranted let alone understand why it became a popular choice. Low-level front end is no joke

It's no surprise that low level frontend is infinitely more performant, accessible and easier to maintain than framework obscured nonsense of this generation.

It devolves into “here’s this really dumb thing that we deal with, oh and this stupid thing is to deal with Y” - it’s really hard to be cynical with trying to break down the layers of abstraction and how they came to be.

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