In the tech world, there's always a plethora of popular tools that have been around for some time, but some people including me just don't have the time/capacity/resource/insert-reason-here to try it out.
For me, it's Docker. Most repos now have a way to setup with Docker and infra services such as AWS or Digital Ocean also provide integrations with Docker. The hype is still going strong as of now and people are starting to use Docker in development as well. However, the effort of running it in development just doesn't justify the gain. Maybe it's great on production, but I have been putting up static sites as of late. I've got no time to invest on this I guess, maybe someday when I need them.
How about you all? I'm curious if people here at dev.to is more like the type of people who would always be trying out (or master) the popular ones, or maybe more like me, stick to the usual until it's necessary to try out popular ones.
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Machine learning, AI, and Blockchain. I'm happy to be aware of what they are and their implications but have no desire to learn them deeply (deep learning?). I'm very confident I can be successful as a technologist without ever training a custom machine learning model.
Ha, true, I think the stigma of those mentioned have become slightly worse over time, now that it has somewhat turned into buzzwords. I see ads of a phone with "AI" camera and it made me cringe a little. But the tech behind it is always interesting to me.
I'm going to say React like a lot of people here :D
I honestly thought I was going to be the only one choosing that.
Let's make a secret society folks! :P
True that, not interested in React has slowly become the popular unpopular opinion.
Yeah, I'm sure that we also love to bash on it, there's bias I have no doubt about it but still... it's a normal reaction to the hype machine that has been created around it :) Same for other technologies
I find it interesting how Angular does the scaffolding built-in, I think it really helps keeping everything under the same standard and structure 👍🏻
A little bit OOT; speaking of NodeJS, I just watched a video about the history of Node and NPM from the JSEUConf. It's really good to learn how things have evolved around NodeJS for the past 10+ years youtube.com/watch?v=MO8hZlgK5zc. There is hope!
Vue.
Coming from React world, it feels strange to be able to mutate nearly everything just like in the old jquery days. Also, I love jsx and having mark-up tapped into js seems to be far more readable and maintainable to me than coding things the vue's way.
Ha, yup, I started using Vue around 1+ year ago from using JSX and CycleJS where it is strictly prohibited to mutate the data and let it flow declaratively through the view. It was quite a paradigm shift for me too.
But Vue has its reasons of doing it differently from React, which has probably been covered by dozens of articles already, so at this point to each his own I guess.
Right. I was astonished when I first ran a Vue app with like 10 lines worth of configs. It's really easy to set up and use, no more worrying about wasted renders and so much more. But it just doesn't feel right...
I think it's important to differentiate freelancers/contractors from employees in this regard.
A freelancer/one-man-shop/consultant may face other consequences if they ignore certain technology. They are hired mostly based on their experience and are expected to be productive quickly.
I, as employed developer, can't choose not to learn tech which I need to use in my projects.
BUT: I don't need to learn it in my free time.
In my case: I couldn't care less about Angular. If I had the choice I wouldn't use it. (Personally I'd try to go with vanilla JS/WebComponents or maybe Vue/React if it fits the project and team.)
The e-commerce-platform we work with decided to base their interface-parts, starter-kits, CMS and whatnot on Angular in future.
(I disagree with that decision and don't think a web-shop should be an SPA. Nothing about this architectural decision makes sense to me. This is cargo-culting in its purest form.)
Still me and the other devs will probably have to work with it at some point.
As employees we don't have to learn "the Ng-Word" in our free time. I organised a three day course at our office with an external trainer. Everybody can take a deep dive this way; No personal time wasted. Plus everybody has a new tag for their CV.
Regarding Docker I feel the same as you. I never needed it for the personal stuff, and projects at work never used it. If we ever should, three-day-course here I come ✌️
This 100x. I should've empasized in the original post that it should be one thing that you have no interest with despite the popularity, but it should be from a hobbyist/weekend programmer standpoint, should have nothing to do with your daily job. That way, I think the opinions can be formed better. But apparently the thread blew up before I realized my mistake.
To answer the original question: I'm going to find it hard to go back to any of the frameworks (See the wall 'o text below).
Java and PHP are both on my list. I've used them both, but doing a deep-dive into them at this point seems like a waste. If I'd focused on mastery 10 years ago, I would feel differently, but it seems like Python and Node are the things we'll be talking about being old 10 years from now and Java and PHP will be in the Perl/COBOL camp of "important historical languages that served as a jumping-off point for more modern languages, but not a good choice for new projects".
Now, the actual reason for my post is that I saw a LOT of React/Angular/Vue point/counterpoint, and someone mentioned Stencil deep in a reply-thread.
Just my two cents on Stencil:
I've been building greenfield in vanilla Stencil (framework-less) since December (design starting in September, with a Java service build in-between haha). I came from Angularjs/Angular-land, and when I did the framework analysis for my current project, it came down to "We need an asynchronous web application, and a SPA is a better choice than static pages hyperlinked together. Should I get some production experience on the resume with React, or try this Stencil thing out?"
I have Stencil v0.0.12 components working on the same page with v1.0.0 (just released). Since they all compile down and don't share framework code (It's a compiler, not a framework) they all just work.
No chasing an upgrade cycle, and the compiled components are spec-compliant, so if it ain't broke I don't have to fix them every time a new version comes out. I went a bit ham and componentized EVERYTHING so my build process is a bit off, but that's my fault, not the compiler (And it's REALLY easy to fix). I can store a .tgz in our local npm and if I need one of the components I just
npm installit. Overall it's been an amazing relief to get away from frameworks and just write code... It uses tsx (jsx with typescript. I still just call it jsx myself haha) and has aspects of a React/Angular/Vanilla mashup...Most importantly: I COULD write the components without Stencil at all. It simply gives me a few convenience features, Developer QOL and polyfill support. But I could write a pure vanilla component and include it on a page and Stencil wouldn't blink an eye. I could include Angular IN a component, or include a component in an Angular app.... same goes for React and Vue. Hell, I could have three components, each running a different framework and they could live in harmony on the same page (Seriously, don't do this guys LOL). Oh yeah, I can also include a component on a static page. It doesn't force me to build a SPA, I just needed the style (And the views/"pages" are components themselves).
Successful micro-frontends are possible and being built today. That's really the reason we've been using the crutches of all these frameworks. The fact that it WASN'T possible because of browser limitations was the whole motivation to use things like React, Angular and Vue in the first place. The spec has now caught-up and incorporated the things we needed to have to do without them, a lot like JQuery had a ton of its functionality absorbed into the spec.
Just being the old guy mentioning that we all need to remember WHY we started using certain tools. Feels like JavaScript-land has started dividing into camps over the last few years, and we need to think about the original motivation to camp here in the first place haha.
Hey, thanks for the insights! With frontend framework giants like React, Vue and Angular, it's great to see a whole different point of view. And yes I truly have missed it in how browsers have caught up and maybe soon those frameworks could be irrelevant as how browsers did it to jQuery. One day I'll try to get out of my comfort zone and try out Stencils or micro-frontends mentioned in this comment, it's buried way deep down here. Wish I could save comments tho, not just posts... cc @devteam ? 😂
Honestly, I don't have a personal need for Docker either, so I'm not inherently interested in it—especially not to the degree that it's abused.
I saw someone else say Java on social media and honestly I couldn't care less about that language.
As a lover of docker, if you are just throwing up static sites, you aren’t really missing anything. Especially since there are a million ways to build/deploy with pretty limited configuration. If you are using circle it’s helpful, but even then, for most personal projects I am happy using Firebase/Zeit/Netlify. Docker is (in my experience) lower level than you need for front end deployment.
This! But for all the good things I've heard about Docker, I should definitely start looking into it.
Oracle. Every Oracle thing I've encountered in the wild has been inflexible as to be borderline useless. Might just be the implementations I've seen, but wow is it frustrating
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