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ronaldj

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I'm not saying things are the best I think they can be. I'm saying the progress is amazing and overall has been positive.

If someone were to make you an offer to build a complex web app right now using current tooling vs traveling back in time to 2010 and building it using 2010 tooling, would you actually choose to go back to 2010?

When I was a younger developer I used to believe things like this. There are tons of roles and different levels to fill. People come from all sorts of backgrounds. You shouldn't discount folks for following a different path. A passionate and curious developer can learn C, C++, Rust if/when they need to.

I would also argue that in the front end world frameworks have vastly improved code quality and developer experience. 10 years ago every team had their own homegrown build system, there were no libraries for type checking, you had write code or conditionals for the lowest version browser you support. Oh and app structure? Every team did something different.

Compare that to now: We have a handful of large open source build systems, so if you jump teams/projects there is consistency. We have things like TypeScript and Flow. We have Babel, which can transpile modern JavaScript in to older versions of the language, so you can support older browsers without even thinking about it. Finally, we have frameworks like React and Vue, which enforce a component based architecture. This is great because you can jump between different projects and for the most part will find code organized in the same way. All of this is amazing.

Ford Fiesta owners got this awful Sync 2 system and a poorly designed transmission. When I purchased, the Sync system seemed like something I could deal with at the time. It aged poorly. It seems like it is getting slower, but that's probably just in comparison to using newer systems with CarPlay.

I also have this added bug where sometimes (once every 6 months or so) the Sync system gets stuck on when I turn off my car and open the door. The screen goes off and the radio keeps playing. Only way to resolve it is to disconnect the battery.

Fitness and confidence is easily overtaken by stupidity and resentment by car drivers on the road, at least around here. The white spray painted bicycles you see along the road can attest to that.

Webpack 5 6 years ago

Configuring the modern JS toolkit (webpack, Babel, your framework of choice, Jest, etc) is such a pain. I’ve been doing front-end for 10+ years. You’re probably not a bozo.

New React DevTools 7 years ago

"There’s no hope of understanding the DOM with React"

This is false. I've been developing with React for over a year and a half and have never used the React dev tools. I've only ever used the browser's web inspector and it's fine. We don't write CSS in JS, so this could play in to that, but when we were evaluating those solutions it wasn't impossible to figure out what was going on, even if you had hashes for class names.

For me it was rock climbing. I had been suffering for a couple of years. I had been to the doctor a couple of times, but I wasn't really getting much out of the exercises he prescribed or the medication. I happened to start doing indoor rock climbing and I noticed my symptoms slowly becoming less frequent. I climbed for about 2 years and during that time my symptoms got much better.

Service Workers creep me out, but maybe I'm in the minority. I don't want web pages to be able to execute code if I'm not actually on their page. To be honest, I don't even want most apps to background refresh on my phone.

Checkout performance is key. It's one of the main reasons I shop there. Even at peak times, the wait time seems to be an order of magnitude less than checking out at Safeway. Also, the person checking you out at Whole Foods is usually happier and nicer than the person checking you out at Safeway.