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by thrower123
2588 days ago
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Exactly, I wouldn't call it boring. Things break in interesting new ways all the time, and you have to constantly be learning, because the pace of change is so breakneck. It's frustrating as all hell though. Debuggers and tooling are in a pretty sad state in comparison to what I'm used to developing server-side and desktop applications, and the iteration loop for making simple changes can be pretty bad, depending on how involved your JS compilation and build pipeline is. |
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I kind of divide web development into three eras: pre-jQuery, jQuery, and post-jQuery. There was a lot of thrash in the pre-jQuery-to-jQuery era; remember MooTools? my first job was using that in 2010, that sure was a time to be doing that kind of thing. I missed most of the jQuery era because I was busy building the systems that the jQuery folks talked to, so I can't speak too much about that, but it seemed relatively stable, if not static, for a long time. And just as I was getting back into web development there was also a lot of thrash in the jQuery-to-post-jQuery era; Angular 1 or Angular 2 while wearing your regulation blue tie or React cool-kids wearing sunglasses at night and you've got the Ember guys over here quietly doing things and I am contractually obligated to mention Vue or I will have between two and thirty responses saying that I forgot about Vue, it's the Ansible of the frontend world.
But at this point it seems...mostly stable? The browsers are mostly predictable and mostly cover everything the 99% case cares about, everybody's browser engine is fast enough even if it isn't fast, and the various ecosystems out there have off-the-shelf solutions for most things and the crowd of Github starrers have given the rest of us decent signals as to what we should give a real look at. I feel like debuggers have gotten a lot better, though admittedly not at the level of something like IntelliJ; I have VSCode set up to breakpoint TypeScript (aside: a lot of what made frontend/JS development suck a lot less was TypeScript winning the metaphorical war) in Firefox and the experience is pretty clean.
Build pipelines can still be bad. Kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I do this" problem, though. Happy-path pipelines seem pretty speedy, although I do most of my development on a thoroughly un-heat-throttled Linux desktop rather than the metric standard Macbook Pro.