Are we overengineering everything in modern frontend dev?

Okay, serious question (but also low-key rant):
How did we go from “just load a page with some content” to entire frontend stacks with build pipelines, 300 dependencies, and five levels of abstraction just to render a freaking button?

Do we really need a separate config for everything (webpack, eslint, prettier, tsconfig, package.json, and don't forget the .babelrc and .env.local)?
Or is it just modern dev trying to look smarter than it is?

Is this the new normal? Or have we lost the plot?

Would love to hear what others think — devs from all backgrounds welcome. Bonus points if you're building sites without frameworks and surviving

Do bears shit in the woods?

I have only two things to say here:

Frontend is not web, stop using it as a synonym.

Yes the web is fucked.

It's because things are web APPLICATIONs now. You run stuff in the browser you would have to install some software for back then. And building applications has always been... more messy. Plus don't forget that JS was never designed for all the things we use it for these days, that's why babel, tsconfig, eslint bullsit all over the place.

we have to keep the complexity high to create jobs. That's the only reason frameworks exist.

@kiki so web devs are frauds

@Lensflare scrypt has artificial complexity added to it so it can't be easily bruteforced. Think of modern framework-driven web development in the same way.

Its complexity is the only reason capitalists HAVE to hire more people. The complexity itself is genuine, that's the whole point, so webdevs that deal with it aren't frauds.

As a backend developer, I also asked myself this question.

I guess most classic websites can live with minimal javascript impact and maybe rely on jQuery and similar. And it seems to be the case for most sites out there (depending on which stats you believe) e.g. https://w3techs.com/technologies/...

So I guess there is a transition point, where a sites become apps, and working with jQuery becomes cumbersome. That's when developers really should switch to a framework.

But once used to it, a developer will use his framework of choice for next web project as well, even if not necessary.

Normal behavior I guess - I also use my electric drill for a single screw, even if I have to carry the complete case instead of a single screwdriver. :)

People getting used to every website taking ages to fully display everything on it, then being baffled when they visit a simple html + css + vanilla javascript website and it doesn't try to murder your grandmother and sacrifice your dog in order to display the simplest to display image without preload rituals that make it seem like it takes even longer than just having the image getting loaded in as it goes.

I remember when sites like Facebook looked a bit better than today and weren't completely overloaded with JavaScript for every single little task, making it impossible to use the same website with barely any new actual features on old, old machines where they would run perfectly smoothly back then.

@Alice web tech was originally designed for static content like a wiki.
When we needed dynamic content we started making ugly hacks. And the ugly hacks kept evolving into what we have now.
We don’t call them hacks anymore because it became normal.

@Lensflare ):

@donkulator Depends. Polar bears don't.

@Lensflare bitch please the whole system is fraud.

How many devs are working in bullshit marketing jobs?

I've just witnessed a demo instance for the new web fronted run out of resources right before the demo after being under development for almost a year... We are not sure if a total of one or two concurrent users took it down. Scaling this will be fun...

@antigermanist

> How many devs are working in bullshit marketing jobs?

I don’t know. I'd guess not that many.
What would a dev even do in a "marketing job"?

@kdvps what the fuck

I recently interviewed with a company that runs Django backend with jQuery, HTML5 and CSS front end. That's it. Oh and a PostgreSQL database.

That's their tech stack. So simple.

After working with Angular for the past year, I would LOVE to just go back to those simple things.

I like to keep in vanilla whenever possible.

The best part of it is that all of you complain and still refuse to make it simple. Here comes the unpopular part:
What was the problem with html css js? As far as I remember there were complete social networks running with it, huge online stores and everything worked just fine.

@blindXfish there is no problem. But we need jobs, so we introduce artificial unnecessary complexity

@blindfish performance and scaling the development team and project were the issue. And increased requirements in the web "application".

@n1cK1337 there are no performance issues, lmao. Those are myths made up to justify using frameworks. Have you actually tried building complex apps from scratch without using frameworks? Because I’ve built a screen for my app that just re-renders the entire root’s innerHTML on state change from ES template strings, and was astounded by its performance.

Simple answer YES

A bit more complex answer is yes but because of money.

You push to vercel, use cloudflare, use s3, use shitton of 3rd party services that you have to pay. What you really need is a ftp and old school cpanel hosting

Ok node support needed, let go to render, flyio, heroku, whatever and pay there!

Have a docker, there is a droplet for 5$ on digital ocean.

Self hosting is 5$ a month and you can use coolify to self host pretty much anything. Show that middle finger to tech bro corpos!

I am also thinking that people are over engineering everything in the last 2 decades.

I see raspberry pi (not pico) used to run handheld gameboy emulator

Its like using the helicopter to get to the store that would take you 2 minutes of walking straight!

Too much resources to achieve something that could work with a tiny fraction of those resources.

I am into electronics so i am talking from my experience

@devJs can you give me hints of how to level up in electronics? I think I have the basics but dont know where to go with it.

@gitstashio learn basic elements first and what they do. get good at soldering, buy good soldering iron/station, start with through the hole elements, SMDs can be tricky.

Find formulas for calculating different things, i dont know the formulas but i know what to google to get them. If you are good at basic math, those formulas will be easy to use.

Buy some cheap ass mcus like esp32 or pi pico and start doing some projects. There are also starter kits with small amount of different elements those are enough to get you started.

KiCad, your own pcbs etc can come later, focus on simpler things first, when you get good at those, upgrading your skills will be much easier.

Google is your friend.

Tl;dr: just build stuff, same as with programming

@devJs

> Tl;dr: just build stuff, same as with programming

I applied that philosophy to an arduino and now its dead. 😅

Good tips though!

@Lensflare yeah, this can be tricky, small mistake can cost you literally.

I fried my laser diode by making stupid mistake, attached to 9v battery directly to see if it can be brighter! 🤦‍♂️

It can't, now it just has faint glow.

One more tip: use glass fuses, you can get like 20 for 2 euros, it can save your board. if the circuit has to draw up to 2A and if the elements can take 2A without burning, put the 2A fuse near the power supply, any surcharge and charge flyback will burn the fuse and save your boards/elements - this might not be the best advice, i usually calculate everything before assembly so i dont use fuses much.

@devJs I would also recommend getting a few bread boards. And watch videos by Ben Eater on youtube. Here's a good one...

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Hello world from scratch on a 6502 chip,

@kiki for most people there might be no difference, yes. but trust me, I've tried changing the "innerHtml" of shit as often as I've needed it done in my Angular project, and the browser died. Speaking of Angular: The reasons why I prefer a framework like that is

- I can code declaratively: I describe how somethings gotta look like and don't have to hide/show millions of things imperatively.

- Good luck building two-way data binding in plain JS

- plain CSS can't do animations like you can in Angular

- a billion other optimisations a framework gives you out of the box

plus good luck working with 30 devs on a codebase where nothing forces you to use a certain structure. but whatever works best for you, I'm not a framework nazi.

@JS-Guy breadboards are bread and the element kits are the butter of starting electronics hobby.

@JS-Guy That shit is insane.

@glowFX well i don't think it's normal to ise tank to kill the fly. For most websites astro or even 11ty is enough, why astro/11ty and not just pure html,css and js?

Well i am not a caveman and i want to make my work to be done gaster and smarter.

Most frameworks are used for web apps and that's a complete different can of worms when you compare them with websites.

But is it unnecessarily complex? It is because humans are bad at elegantly solving the problems - not in general but vast majority is, there's always that dude who is email dedicated developer that will slip table into the layout.

Too many jacks with too many trades

Y'all starting to sound like ol' gramps ranting about how everything was better in the old days. Frameworks help streamline collaboration, prevent stupid mistakes, increase legibility of code, increasing maintainability. Yes, you might not always need it for everything and the skill of using vanilla js can be very valuable. But the question if you are overengineering is really dependent on requirements and how many people are involved in development and what kind of people. One can also easily overengineer doing something in vanilla js that has a battle-tested framework native counterpart. In the end we just need to be pragmatic about it. Framework / vanilla can go hand in hand.

@ogier i do agree here, but to be honest using backend for frontend while you have traditional backend for manipulating the data seems like you have small go-kart inside the car so you drive go-kart to drive the car.

I get the use case for bff that next js promotes, but you probably don't need it.

I also agree that modern tooling resolved most of the issues we had in past, so i am okay with using the new shiny toys, but sometimes for some things i just ask myself why use it if we have solution that is equally competent with fewer hoops to jump through and does the job well.

I just hate the marketing hype of the next, its like saying buy this coffee because its vegan! Cool stuff, now vegans can drink coffee too, before it was made of... , oh wait, it was always vegan... But most people don't get to the last part because they have attention span smaller than they have TTL on their shiny next website.

@ogier you've not seen the dumpster fire of a "modern" framework Angular project I've had to work on this past year. Some code is worse than most vanilla JS projects I've seen. None of the benefits of a modern framework is applicable to this project. I'm not shitting on frameworks, I use them myself and some of them are great.