Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bartread 618 days ago
I feel the same. My immediate reaction to this wasn’t excitement but, “Oh fucking hell, not another one.” It’s so tiring and demotivating. Most of the cycle burning problems I deal with day to day are workarounds for quirks in the framework du jour (currently NextJS for me), and aren’t directly related to the actual interesting, value-adding problem I’m trying to solve.

I am so fed up of this churn. It is boring. It is uncreative. It is uninspiring. It is a waste of the limited time I have left it my life. All it achieves is to keep me shackled to the fucking hamster wheel and I am so tired of it.
1 comments
the_sleaze_ 616 days ago
I feel this perspective every single day, but then I recently went to get my old tires replaced. The people there's days are 8 solid hours of taking tires off, putting tires on, driving the vehicle over to the alignment rack and gluing weight onto wheels. All day. And they get paid pretty well all things considered.

I'm happy learn some new things even if there's resistance.

link
bartread 616 days ago
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. For me, though, the interest comes from the different problems we're trying to solve within the domain we're working in, not from learning yet another front-end framework.

(EDIT: Here's a great example of the kind of quirky bullshit I absolutely hate dealing with in JS frameworks: https://www.propelauth.com/post/getting-url-in-next-server-c.... Why do I have to jump through so many hoops just to get the pathname of the URL within a server component? Seriously, why are you making me write all this bullshit unnecessary code that adds no value to my end user to achieve something so simple? Absolutely ridiculous.)

I don't mind picking something up where it makes sense: over the past year I've found myself using Python fairly regularly for more data science type tasks, but in that case - again - it makes sense for the problems I'm trying to solve. It's the right libraries, the right ecosystem, the right tooling, and it's pretty stable and mature. I feel like anything I learn there is still going to be useful in 5 or maybe even 10 years.

The thing with JS and even TypeScript is that they're no longer immature technologies. Yet within the broader ecosystem around the languages we cannot seem to move beyond endlessly reinventing the wheel in very much the way we were already doing a decade ago. And, yes, there is progress, but the benefits versus the costs - to me - seem so minimally incremental nowadays as to be not worth the disruption. And the balance has tipped enough that it seems like really a lot of this churn is simply wasting peoples' time.

Like, if I'm going to learn something, I want it to really transform the capabilities at my disposal. The Python ecosystem is a great example of this but it's not the only one: I've never been a Ruby guy but I'm seriously considering picking up Rails 8 for my own interest simply because it streamlines and simplifies so much and the emphasis on realising and shipping the idea (or the value) is built-in.

link