Ask HN: Elitist or reasonable concerns on state of front end development?
My freelancing to date has largely consisted of ML, stream processing, data integrations, microservices, and other backend work. However, more recently I've shifted to include frontend work with react/reflux/react-native/electron and I have run into a high number of issues with development practices. I find myself declining most work for obvious lapses in development practices and, on occasion, "duped" into accepting a client that sounds good on paper but isn't.
I have observed a severe lacking in areas like:
- Testing (i.e. usually none, which is often spun like an odd pro that they are so "fast")
- Devops (e.g. lack of repeatable/automatic deployments, things must be hand-touched, no continuous integration)
- Project management (e.g. no tracking of bugs, features, etc via issues, no milestone usage, no documentation)
- Git/Github basics (e.g. don't break the branch when doing PRs, create useful commit messages)
- Understanding of CSS/HTML basics (e.g. best practices, standards, anti-patterns)
- Understanding of React/Flux basics (e.g. child keys, anti-patterns, bastardizing with some weird approach)
- Understanding of functional programming basics (e.g. immutablity, HOFs, pure functions)
- Understanding of computer science basics (e.g. weird custom approaches that poorly mimic trees, no big-o concerns that hurt perf, memory leaks)
- Separation of concerns (e.g. making UI components know about and concerned with the data persistence layer)
- Security (e.g. secure credentials committed, pretty much an afterthought)