Something about Typescript feels...off

Vagrant Jin Kazama — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 07:59:33 +0000

Non-technical post

I noticed something strange about 2 years ago. Medium.com was exploding - bursting at the seams with praises of typescript. Just so we are clear, I'm 29 years old and by no means a greybeard meandering the world of software, decrying the good ol' days. It's just that TS was everywhere, all of a sudden. It didn't get the same treatment as other beloved pieces of open source software - it just appeared and filled every nook and cranny of every platform I use for web related consumption. Be it HN, Youtube, Medium, reddit, forums, newspapers...

Perhaps I might be a little bias about Microsoft spearheading anything web related. You could call me a tinfoil skeptic - but these big companies seem to pumping out tools which were normally the domain of the crazy internet genius dude who works for some backwater agency in the Ukraine. Come to think of it, React.js had a similar trajectory. What is this nagging feeling?

growth hacking developers

Yep. This might be it.

This is my best hypothesis. We're part of a growth hack. Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook barely pay taxes, let alone feed the homeless 300m outside their campuses, why would those same folks wax lyrical about a free web? Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft basically own web development. React app, written in Typescript on VSCode on a Macbook hosted on EC2/Lightsail instance("free tier")...does that sound too familiar?

We are being vendor locked. This time not with the stick Apple and Microsoft used back in the day, but with a carrot. The web is becoming, quite literally 4 or 5 websites and other stuff. Like cattle, we probably won't realize it until it's too late. Let me continue the cattle analogy: Imagine we are cattle in a farm out in the grasslands. We eat juicy grass from damp fields with fresh mountain water in spring. Life is good. The human's dog keeps the foxes and coyotes away, we get injections to keep fleas away and we live in giant enclosures when it's cold. At what point do you realize that the Trader Joe's truck that comes through once in a while is in fact carrying your childhood friend in cold storage? They about to be Ashley's top sirloin and Melissa's Rib-eye.

My beloved language Python, it's creator works for Microsoft now. That's the end game. If an eccentric like Guido could not resist the sirenic appeal of cold, hard American cash - what hope do the rest of us have?

I know some folks are like, "Why you must crazy see? There's so much choice out there it's unbelievable see?" - to them I say - is there?

We need more realistic web development knowledge sharing

Vagrant Jin Kazama — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 09:42:52 +0000

Online web dev tutorials are taking a dangerous turn. Medium articles galore, stackoverflow aplenty...but none of them teach the most important developer skill that is worth its weight in gold. No, it's not "React" or "Svelte" or "Tailwind" buzzword soup.

It's testing and debugging. Unsexy, ugly, schlep inducing work that customers and clients don't see, other devs don't care about, management doesn't know about, your fiance doesn't GAS about.

A developer spends at the very least 30% of their time debugging. And many hours have been spent on hair pulling with simple bugs that could have been caught with good tests. Don't get me wrong, tests are not a magic pill for bugfree code. Coding is still very much an artistic discipline. Testing keeps us in line, away from the rabbit holes.

"Building a chat app in two hours" type of tutorials are great and probably well intentioned, but they leave out the other 40+ hours of real work. Especially if the person building the "chat app" is a senior dev who isn't really thinking about a junior developers mental model of how to build a system - and how it's radically different from theirs.

Here's some links to get beginner/junior developers started on the journey to solving problems and building good, robust and reliable systems. Even if it's a simple login form.

Javascript Debugging

Techsith tutorials

Stackify Debugging

DEV Community: Vagrant Jin Kazama

Something about Typescript feels...off

growth hacking developers

We need more realistic web development knowledge sharing

Here's some links to get beginner/junior developers started on the journey to solving problems and building good, robust and reliable systems. Even if it's a simple login form.