| > Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals. The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity. > You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today > A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect. This cannot be further from the truth, if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today. The best front-end devs I know are basically Javascript developers, everything else is "tech du jour" that comes and goes and the less of it you invest in the better off you'll be in the long-run. > If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks. Hard disagree with this unless you are doing simple CRUD-like stuff |
"Front-end professional" and "no tooling" have been exclusive propositions since the early 2010s. You either learned to use tools or you were out of the loop.
> which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today
Not really. Historically, the main problem with front-end development has not been change, but the pace of it. That's how it ties in with the current discussion regarding the (now) ever-changing terrain of LLM-assisted coding. Front-end development is still changing today, but it's coalescing and congealing more than it's revolving. The chasms between transitions are narrowing. If you observe how long Webpack lasted and familiarity with it carried over to using Vite, it's somewhat safe to expect that the latter will last even longer and that its replacement will be a near copy. Someone putting time to learn front-end skills today might reap the benefits of that investment longer.
> if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today.
I did. I got a copy of the Rhino book 4th ed. and read it cover to cover. I would not advise to learn JS today with historical references. JS was not designed like most other languages. It was hastily put together to get things done and it had a lot of "interesting", but ultimately undesirable, artifacts. It only slowly turned into a more sensible standard after-the-fact. Yes, there are some parts that are still in its core identity, but a lot in the implementation has changed. Efforts like "Javascript: The Good Parts", further standardization, and TS helped to slowly turn it into what we know today. You don't need to travel back in time for that mastery. Get a modern copy of the Rhino book and you'll be as good as the best of them.