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Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

I watch a YouTuber called Theo Browne sometimes. He is primarily a front end dev. When I watch him talk about his solutions to things I feel like i've been hit on the head with a baseball bat. The sheer number of things that go into his demos is eye watering. The number of arcane terms about React he will mention in a single video astounds me.

I don't mean to specifically call him out, but I worry that the complexity is what keeps him popular. And then you have someone like Pieter Levels just slinging raw php into production and not talking about anything like Suspense or Server Side Rendering or Hydration.

They both get to the same ends (well Pieter Levels makes magnitudes of order more money I think) but there is a gulf in complexity. I'd actually argue something like Nomad List is much more feature rich than anything I see from Theo.

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I met Theo once. I didn't know who he was, but he made sure to tell me within the first few sentences that he was a very popular streamer/youtuber. I then watched him get recognized by someone else and they had a sort of friendly shouting match about something Theo has recently talked about in an opinionated way on his channel. His personality seemed perfectly suited for maximal media engagement through needless complexity. The more complicated things are the more arguments you can have and the smarter you can sound to those less familiar with all your esoteric choices.

I know Theo. He’s a good person who wants to educate folks, and make things simpler.

There are problems with education: you often have to make things contrived to show problems as fast as possible, and it’s hard to convey all of the nuance. Theo, and others, definitely try to strike that balance and I think it’s fair to say that this is because of how the front end world works rather than because of personalities.

I'm finding more and more that Youtube influencer software development is completely disconnected from real world software development.

The amount of libraries and code for toy stuff is humongous compared to anything I see in production, and I've seen some monstrosities.

I wonder for how long, though.

My experience with frontend people is that they don't think twice about adding random libraries they just found that was released month ago. Also their projects are unmaintainable after one year, but they are long gone by that time and new developers arguing that they need to rewrite everything.

I really hate small libraries and in my projects I tend to rewrite lots of trivial stuff, but that keeps me comfortable.

Looks like they found a way to unionize and achieve job security in a very roundabout sort of way.

DHH's plain JS, plain CSS obsession was right all along?

I wouldn't call it exactly right "all along", after years of him and the Rails team jumping bandwagons and having Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, CoffeeScript, SASS, Sprockets with Babel, Webpack and then whatever is there now shipping as defaults in Rails, along with lots of other stuff.

But he's been reasonable in the last couple years, sure.

Yeah, good point, for frontend, influencer code is definitely already leaking.

> I'm finding more and more that Youtube influencer software development is completely disconnected from real world software development.

You don’t need the qualifiers. Influencers are disconnected from the real world, no matter the area. That’s why they’re “influencers”, being a celebrity is the point. Think of it in contrast to someone you’d label a “maker” where the value of what they teach/build is much higher yet they have a comparatively much smaller (and usually geeky) audience.

No, I think it's pretty well connected to real world software development. Most software developers these days, especially in web, tend to be more of "copy the stuff I've seen in tutorials before or find a library that does it" rather than "understand how the stuff I'm copying works and adapt it"

Each layer of framework or abstraction you add, actually tends to make the complexity go up, as it includes so much crap you'll never use but gets in the way of the stuff you will use. And now when something goes wrong not only do you need to understand the programming language, and your own code, but also all the code in the paths you use through this framework, which can easily be 10-20 functions deep (hi facades), and is extremely rarely documented with enough specificity to understand what happens in various corner cases.

My biased opinion that this is Frontend/JS landscape. The amount of tools used to make relatively simple things is staggering. I feel similar things going on in DevOps.

I have been hoping that isomorphic JS would take over PHP for a long time. Sadly these complexity gurus have been sucking the oxygen out of the room for over a decade now. I think it's the corporate "front end developers" who caused these problems. Almost like an envy of full stack or back end developers doing the "real engineering". Which drove the desire to have "real engineering" problems on the front end.

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