ZvG_Bonjwa's comments

There is some good food for thought here.

One thing I’ll also say: building static websites and building big interactive web apps are two points on a LONG spectrum. Yet for some reason online discourse ignores this.

This enormous spectrum gets compressed into just “modern web dev” or “JavaScript”. Not just in conversation, but in teaching materials, job postings, you name it. It leads to wild disconnects and disagreements between people who think they are peers but are actually building radically different things.

In the first instance, even if you’re right and the manager thinks team lead is the problem here, it’s quite the leap to go straight to “questions his leadership qualities” over a single interpersonal conflict or difference in viewpoint. It’s plausible, sure. But the manager could just as easily be trying to avoid (needed) conflict.

To your second point, there’s MANY other explanations. We don’t know how the team reacted for a start - maybe they did back up OP. Or maybe, based on the alleged jerk’s aggressive behaviour to the team in the past, they felt scared to speak up. Or maybe they’re junior. Or maybe you’re right and all 9 people unanimously felt OP was in the wrong.

My point wasn’t any of this though, it was mainly: avoid coming to such harsh judgments based on so much extrapolation. Criticise the reported actions, sure, discuss some hypotheticals, but going straight for “you’re a bad leader” goes a bit beyond.

There is, I think, a sort of innocent arrogance that comes with people who boldly claim that renowned, well-adopted frameworks or technologies are straight up bad or a non-improvement over yesterday’s tech.

That’s not to say popularity guarantees quality, that progress is always positive, or that there’s not plenty to criticise. But I do think authors of articles like this sometimes get a big hit from being subversive by playing into retro-idealist tropes. The engineering equivalent of paleo influencers.

Such proposals would suggest a huge global collective of the world’s most talented engineers have been conned into fundamentally bad tech, which is a little amusing.

I take issue with comments like this, firing off inflammatory criticism based on nothing but guesswork and extremely tenuous “deductions”. There’s like, 8 extremely debatable assumptions here.

Reading between the lines is fair but architecting entire narratives is a stretch. Even then, the narrative lacks logic: why are we arbitrarily trusting what the manager and engineer says “at face value” but not OP? Where on earth is it even remotely implied that OP lets the engineers do what they want?

Repeatedly saying “I don’t know what’s really happening buuut” is not a coupon to let you arrive at such a negative conclusion.

The negativity oozing out of this article undermines the main points (of which there’s some good ones). Belittling and admonishing an entire cohort of your peers because they like a tech you don’t is not helpful.

I think React has some fundamental API issues (Solid/Svelte are better) and there’s way too many petabytes of JS out there for sure. But it pioneered some great concepts, and its ecosystem is robust.

Building complex interactive web apps without a framework is still a disaster in 2025. React and friends are not going anywhere until that changes.

Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?

Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.

And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.

The "be offensive" goading only happened long after Grok had already started going off the rails to pretty innocuous queries.

This is not the first time Grok has exhibited this behaviour either (i.e. the random white genocide rants from a few months back).

There is a big difference between a model being "breakable" and a model demonstrating inherent radical bias. I think people are right to be concerned.

Indeed, and like Theo, I finished the video with little sympathy towards WP Engine. I think Matt's trademark argument is sound.

But as Theo pointed out, the public was not privy to this long running dispute, and Automattic's drastic action came effectively out of nowhere.

Matt seems so preoccupied with this line of thinking (i.e. is WP Engine doing something wrong) and not nearly preoccupied enough with the impact on the Wordpress userbase, the long-term perceptions of the Wordpress brand, and the overall business confidence in Wordpress as a platform. There are ways to balance both, but Matt has chosen not to.

It is clear to me that Matt sees Wordpress as "the foundation" and "the trademark" and "Wordpress.com" and not the 25% of the public internet that uses it.

Having sat through this, the main thing that irked me was Matt's lack of empathy towards impacted users.

Every time Theo tried to talk about the negative community impact or the perceived stability of the platform as a whole, Matt forcefully steered the conversation back towards criticising WP Engine.

Matt seems more concerned with retribution towards WP Engine than doing what's right for the WHOLE userbase. It almost doesn't matter how right or wrong he is in his arguments against WP Engine, what worries me is that he is being vindictive in a way that undermines everything he's built.

I ask this earnestly, but have you tried it? It most certainly can write a pretty huge variety of code. Yes, it does often have errors, and it struggles with novel or complex problems (as the article points out), but for well known languages and frameworks it is still insanely impressive.

I think you've accidentally proven his point. Half the things you've mentioned have been around for half a decade at this point, and pretty much all of them have existed for at least 2+ years.

Frontend is still a fast moving space with a large ecosystem - and I get for some, that's not ideal. But this 'frontend fads' meme isn't really reflective of the current reality.

Webpack - 2012, Next - 2016, Nuxt - 2016, Nest - 2017, Parcel - 2018, Blazor - 2018, React Hooks - 2019, Vite - 2020, Vue 3 - 2020, ESBuild - 2020, Sveltekit - 2020

This is a disappointing and highly inflammatory article. There’s a nuanced and interesting discussion to be had here but the author chooses to demonise and insult entire communities. Does this rhetoric help anyone?

Making highly interactive web apps in 2013 was painful and it is revisionist history to claim otherwise. Keyword being “highly interactive”. If you’ve been mostly building traditional sites then it’s a different situation.

The author says he likes Knockout… well, I respect Knockout too, but having spent many years maintaining a decade-old enterprise Knockout app, it is painfully clear that React was actually real progress.

These frameworks - warts and all - do solve real problems. Just as you shouldn’t trust someone who tells you they’re perfect, nor should you trust someone who dismisses them as a con.

Oh, come on. So the guy uses some harmless exaggeration when selling himself on his own personal website & you're taking him to programmer jail over it?

Do you frequently launch into personal attacks on authors whose articles you disagree with?

Melbourne is a positive outlier and not at all representative of the rest of Australia. Finding senior devs in Brisbane is an insanely arduous process and its not uncommon to see positions take 6+ months to fill (at least at the places I've worked at). Even when companies start throwing money around like crazy, the talent just isn't there.

I've heard that Sydney isn't so great either. Once devs hit seniority they run along to join a hip Melbournian startup, get gobbled up by Atlassian, or just migrate to Silicon Valley.