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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I stepped off frontend the treadmill and haven’t been able to catch up with frontend. React, Angular, Vue, Next, Nuxt, Svelte, Typsecript, Tailwind, Bundlers.

It feels like a mountain to climb to get my head around that lot!

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I don’t really understand why people seem to decouple learning from doing. Isn’t it possible to only learn what you need when you need it? It’s not like you even have to learn an entire framework/etc each time you run into a new one, just learn the specific part you need at that time. What am I missing?

But until you don't know something, you can't use it and, most importantly, you can't understand that you need it.

Like, how can you understand the tradeoffs between react, svelte or vanilla js until you have a basic knowledge of them?

If you're a front-end developer, it shouldn't take long to research the differences between modern front end frameworks. If you don't have any existing front-end skills, you won't have the ability to know what to dive into. True beginners need a solid foundation to build on, but once you have that foundation you should be able to adapt it to new and changing technology very easily. Once you have the foundation, you can dive as deep as you need into specific specialties and jump back out quite easily.

Learning your first programming language is hard. There's a lot of details and idiosyncrasies. The second is a bit easier because you have a base of experience to reference it against. By the time you're picking up your sixth language or front end framework or node API framework, you should be able to much more quickly assimilate the details because you've got so much more experience to draw on.

This mentality is what leads to paint drip shaped people. It's a very good practice in my experience. Go just as deep as you need to solve the problem.

https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2021/07/28/kent-becks-...

Most of those are just rehashing of already discovered ideas. It is not like they have much of a secret sauce. Just put some concepts together. If you are a good developer, you can understand what they do in no time. But that makes it even more annoying to see the hype around something that is nothing special. Add to that a mountain of silly configurations and limitations due to design decisions, and you get a "modern" web stack. Take for example "tree shaking". I remember how there was a hype around it. Every second day I would see some post about tree shaking or read some blog or whatever, where people point out tree shaking. Tree shaking! Tree shaking here! tree shaking there! Most of them never stopped and thought about how they shouldn't need to be shaking, but instead should avoid putting that much shakable shit into their trees in the first place.

It almost seems like people are getting off on the fact, that they manage configuration complexity in web projects, as if that makes them somehow qualified. Instead they should be saying:

Wait a minute, why am I configuring all this shit? Why is my web app so big, that using a minifier makes any significant difference? Does my web app really do that much? Couldn't I get by with just rendering templates and add a tiny amount of JS?

But people do not ask and continue riding the hype train and it even makes them more in demand, because way too many people think they need this.

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