Sarah MeiVerified account

Almost every framework adds complexity. There was a time when all you need it to develop with Javascript was a browser and a text editor. Then Node, Webpack, Babel, Angular, React, etc. arrived each one with their own CLI, package managers, versions, etc. Now it is a mess.

Sure, but in those days your JS was 50% conditionals by weight for browser checking. I don’t miss those.

Actually if you leveraged jQuery this solved all the browser compat issues. That’s what it was designed for. But people of today seem ungrateful for jQuery for some reason which is a shame

Right absolutely! But jquery is a framework, & OP was specifically talking about the good old days when all you needed was a text editor & a browser - no frameworks.

Plus jquery wasn’t released until 2006, so there was more than a decade of JS development before it wad even available. Those were the bad old days in terms of conditionals, but maybe the good old days in terms of approachability

51. I’ll use Postgres to back this. 52. echo "gem 'pg'" >> Gemfile && bundle install 53. ...fuck.

oh god you're telling me that tomorrow night is going to be another 50 steps?

computers were a mistake

We talked to @wycats about this kind of (accidental? intentional?) shift to developer-centrism on a recent @copypastepod episode. Yehuda’s “next 5 years” vision is to put web development back into the hands of designers, learners, hobbyists. This has me wondering how I can help.

I’ve heard several devs I admire say “if I were to start now, I’m not sure I’d have made it into web development”. This goal-post-moving is insidious and a bad long term plan. It puts the web at risk vs. the focus on approachability I’ve seen in hardware/mobile/native dev.

I'm gonna put my focus into Ember and the Ember community, which has a great perspective on this problem and not a lot of people fighting for approaches that make it harder to for experienced developers to share with beginners.

Intermediate developers are underserved in communities like Rails and Ember. imo this is largely because there isn't enough material to help people level up their skills and bosses don't give people time to learn in familiar environments.

This leads to people jumping from their normal day-to-day task to an ecosystem more focused on teaching intermediate developers more skills, and bosses are pretty ok with people spending 6 months to migrate something to react or microservices.

But the way that these environments are friendly to intermediate developers looking to learn is by exposing the guts of the solution up front. This does force the issue on learning but also reduces accessibility (or generally increases beginner confusion)

TLDR I think it's incumbent on conventional tools to focus on an "intermediate track" where people can level up their skills beyond the framework's public face, and it's incumbent upon bosses to give people time to learn in existing parts of the stack.

Oh by the way it doesn't help that the tech community completely abandoned windows, which is where most beginners live. I started rails on Windows using RADRails. Today, rails new doesn't work on Windows.