The frontend tooling debacle has got to the point where I'm not only leaving frontend development, but tech entirely. To not have to think about this endless nonsense anymore is such a massive weight off my shoulders.
And both of these tools are basically drop in replacements for each other with very little configuration. This blog post is saying the performance difference is negligible.
So I guess it’s bad that instead of radically different configs and performance of Webpack vs Rollup vs Parcel vs etc, compared to the future of choosing between a much more mature build tool market with Vite and Turbopack is a bad thing?
Amazing, you helped the person in question with a single sentence. I can feel their stress disappearing.
Mere fact that we're at the point where we have transpiler upon transpiler upon transpiler, where "wRiTtEn iN rUsT" is used as quality/performance control, where people throw term performance around as if it's a hot potato and no one mentions environments/hardware and actual real world use scenarios and where apparently everyone are building World of Warcraft scale apps in frontend is what's making a mockery out of entire frontend world. It's no wonder that entry is difficult and that so many impostors are trying to build a name for themselves by producing yet another useless library that's gazillion times faster than the other useless library.
Frontend is a joke because of self-proclaimed developers building tools which they themselves can't use or explain to wide audience and that causes negative feeling when one has to deal with frontend manure.
Do you remember when we were stuck on Grunt? Options are good.
I wish you well in your new career as a professional sculptor but "the js ecosystem has too many options!" gets posted on every one of these threads with little specific relevance to the article at hand.
Are there companies that expect their developers to keep up with the latest developments so aggressively? At my job, things like Remix/Deno/Turbopack make the water-cooler conversations, but we only use established tools for projects. I think it would take several years for me to fall behind if I simply ignored new frameworks and tools.
I thought this too, working at a company mostly focused on jQuery/Rails as a foundation for a lot of the work I was doing.
I've been searching for a "full-stack" Web development job for the past 8 months this year, and aside from industry incompatibilities, the biggest headwind I'm facing finding an employer that recognizes front-end development is so much bigger than how you arrange your JavaScript to enable interactivity.
I have experience with React; my last career position allowed me to go from 0-100% confidence/competence with Svelte in 4 months. But employers want to see some equivalent of "3-5 years experience with React" and structure their shitty technical assessments similarly, and I've really had a problem trying to find the right way to show I'm just as qualified.
Build tools: when I interview candidates I ask them to explain what things like Webpack do. I don't care if they can write a config for it (but it's nice).
Runtimes: a lot of frontend JS engineers don't know what these are. Being able to explain them (and the difference between Node and Deno for ex) is a good answer. For backend jobs this is a hard requirement, but when I see "Node" in a frontend job listing I assume it means "can install packages from Node."
Frameworks: (like Next) it depends. If I'm hiring for an app already built in one, maybe. A general answer like "SSR is a problem with React" and "this framework solves that problem this way" is useful.