The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason

A depressing but accurate description of the economics of web development.

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.

Front-end development’s identity crisis - Elly Loel

I know how to do full-stack development, not because I wanted to but because I had to.

Grim, but true. I know quite a few extremely talented front-end developers who have been forced out of the field because of what’s described here.

There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.

Kind of annoyed at React

React was never able to stand on its own merits as a framework (as its merits are few). Now the cracks are really starting to show.

Cameron Dutro on ruby.social

Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.

Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.

It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.

My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.