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Discussion on: Where am I now in web development?

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peerreynders profile image
peerreynders

Angular is my weapon of choice for web development.

"Web development" is so much bigger than any one framework (Rendering on the Web).

The choice of framework influences the style of web solution which tends to favour certain application domains.

My assessment would be that Angular's space is primarily "internal corporate web applications" because enterprises love "batteries included" solutions, target primarily desktop PCs and have infrastructures that make its relative "heaviness" irrelevant and don't care if the resulting application isn't the snappiest in the world (where is "the user" going to go anyway?; Angular Usage Statistics).

So if you're able to continue to work in that kind of environment you're likely set.

Initially I viewed Vue as a bit of "destination for Angular refugees" which slimmed it down to its core and then started adopting "good ideas" from other sources but it's been doing its own thing for a while. There was a time where some places seemed to migrate from Angular(JS) to Vue "to simplify development" - not sure whether that is still going on.

And while the React (& Next.js) devotees constantly promote it as unopionated, it's no silver bullet either and is often used in sub-optimal places.

To make things worse Angular/Vue/React/Svelte/Solid mostly cover various flavours of SPA.

To get a glimpse at some of the more recent directions have a look at

Meanwhile recently

jQuery 1.6.4 dates back to 2011-09-12!

So some of Amazon's pages use 10+ year old client side technology while (presumably) some custom Java-based server rendering pipeline that has been constantly tuned and tweaked over the years is capable of producing the necessary content with minimal latency—just so the customer won't get distracted.


As already mentioned the "fundamentals and standards of HTML, CSS and JS" have merit—going forward having a good understanding of how the public web works and what the constraints are (The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance)) could be more useful than trying to get into yet another framework specific mindset (at this point).

The idea being is that one should have enough foundational knowledge to competently assess the needs of any particular "problem" and judge which web technologies are a suitable choice towards a solution (provided there still is a choice)—rather that being a "hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of framework developer).

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arriagar profile image
Humberto Arriaga

Thank you for the feedback, it's really valuable! Sometimes one can get distracted with all the information out there, trying to stay updated, while disregarding what actually matters. This is a motivation to keep writing and posting opinions, as it is a realization of how little I truly know and how much to keep learning.