[afloatboat]

I was recently thinking of posting a similar ask hn, but opted not to because if felt too complainy and I’m not sure if the issue is with me or not.

I mainly feel that the scope of a developer’s responsibilities is constantly growing and it’s becoming too much.

I started doing front-end ~20 years ago. At that time we got a psd file, cut it into pieces and created a clickable mock-up. Maybe you’d need to loop through some php of a templating language to make it more dynamic but the logic resided in the backend.

Today I’m still responsible for converting that design, but it’s no longer a clickable mock-up, it’s now an application with its own state and logic that needs to be managed. We now have auth in the client so OAuth comes into play as well.

Instead of creating an index.htm and style.css we npm init which throws cryptic errors about mismatched dependencies, use a bundler, typescript, eslint, … all with their own config. It’s crazy to juggle all this config he’ll.

We used to upload our files to an ftp and called it a day. Now I have to setup a CI/CD, configure our AWS setup and it should all happen in one sprint.

As a React developer it’s also assumed that you know React Native. So you don’t only need to manage node, npm, … you’re now managing Xcode, Android Studio and the entire ecosystem that comes with it. How can you possibly build something of quality under these circumstances?

So yes, we should take a step back and look at the complexity we’re creating. Or at least look into splitting up that complexity into more different roles so that a front-end developer can do front-end again.

[nunez]

The bar's been raised a lot since dotcom took off. Soon you'll need to know prob/stats and matrix algebra to troubleshoot your company's LLM that builds the frontends...and also all of that other stuff, since you're fixing that by hand anyway!

[tracker1]

I agree to an extent. I've been relatively happy with the progress in JS. I'm not happy with the lack of attention to performance and bloated applications.

I think that spoke things in the horizon are interesting in terms of hybrid app tools from next, next, astro, Blazor and others.

I also find HTMX pretty compelling. I still like React a lot though.