Anyone who has worked with Webpack will know just how horrible it was to learn and get used to. The made-up-on-the-spot terminology. Confusing, lacking and unempathetic documentation. Configurations using bizarre syntax contained in a single string. Mega-ultra hideous configurations, even for simple projects and boilerplates. Unintuitive naming conventions. Lack of useful tooling. Lack of GUI's.
What is being done to bring Webpack back into the real world where real human beings desperately struggle through the process of learning this unwieldy, fragmented, clustertruck of a tool?
Sean Larkin is an award winning public speaker, giving talks all over the world on webpack, JavaScript, and web perf. Currently he is a SWE at Microsoft managing Web Infra for OneDrive/Sharepoint
Anyone who has worked with Webpack will know just how horrible it was to learn and get used to.
Hey Jake. First, thanks a lot for the candid feedback. It's stuff like this which continues to set the bar high for us.
The made-up-on-the-spot terminology. Confusing, lacking and unempathetic documentation.
I can't speak as much for the terminology, but I know naming are hard. What's incredible to me is that if you feel you have some great ideas or suggestions, then your are simply an issue or PR away from webpack's next great contribution. So I totally urge you to submit one with some ideas.
In terms of our documentation, we know that webpack 1 was pretty bad, but when we released webpack 2, we considered our documentation the number one feature of the release. If you haven't checked it out yet, go to webpack.js.org/. Also if you have suggestions or ideas that can help us better empathize with developers here also, we yearn for your feedback.
Configurations using bizarre syntax contained in a single string. Mega-ultra hideous configurations, even for simple projects and boilerplates. Unintuitive naming conventions. Lack of useful tooling.
This is one of the hardest things we struggle with as maintainers & users of this project. The single handed largest trade-off to JavaScript as configuration is that, like all code, can be written extremely poor. My advice for now is to try and treat your webpack config with the same amount of scrutiny that you do the rest of your code. That way it is readable, approachable, etc. I cover this in a course I did on webpack.academy/!
I'm not quite sure what you mean by lack of tooling, but I definitely know that having some sort of UI or VSCode integration would be a killer feature to add to webpack in some way or another. Again, feedback, ideas, RFC's, and simply communicating with us on GitHub, etc can really help getting these great ideas flowing.
What is being done to bring Webpack back into the real world where real human beings desperately struggle through the process of learning this unwieldy, fragmented, clustertruck of a tool?
Every day, we try and work with Framework Authors, users, contributors, even browser vendors to try and empathize on a variety of different levels to understand what we can do to continue to innovate not only the performance, and internals, but also public facing API's.
To be honest, the passion burning through this paragraph makes me believe you'd be a huge positive impact on webpack through your ideas and contributions. Doesn't have to be code either, bring your best skills, and make some real positive impact on the 5million users and 9million monthly downloads that use webpack.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Anyone who has worked with Webpack will know just how horrible it was to learn and get used to. The made-up-on-the-spot terminology. Confusing, lacking and unempathetic documentation. Configurations using bizarre syntax contained in a single string. Mega-ultra hideous configurations, even for simple projects and boilerplates. Unintuitive naming conventions. Lack of useful tooling. Lack of GUI's.
What is being done to bring Webpack back into the real world where real human beings desperately struggle through the process of learning this unwieldy, fragmented, clustertruck of a tool?
100% agree with this
Hey Jake. First, thanks a lot for the candid feedback. It's stuff like this which continues to set the bar high for us.
I can't speak as much for the terminology, but I know naming are hard. What's incredible to me is that if you feel you have some great ideas or suggestions, then your are simply an issue or PR away from webpack's next great contribution. So I totally urge you to submit one with some ideas.
In terms of our documentation, we know that webpack 1 was pretty bad, but when we released webpack 2, we considered our documentation the number one feature of the release. If you haven't checked it out yet, go to webpack.js.org/. Also if you have suggestions or ideas that can help us better empathize with developers here also, we yearn for your feedback.
This is one of the hardest things we struggle with as maintainers & users of this project. The single handed largest trade-off to JavaScript as configuration is that, like all code, can be written extremely poor. My advice for now is to try and treat your webpack config with the same amount of scrutiny that you do the rest of your code. That way it is readable, approachable, etc. I cover this in a course I did on webpack.academy/!
I'm not quite sure what you mean by lack of tooling, but I definitely know that having some sort of UI or VSCode integration would be a killer feature to add to webpack in some way or another. Again, feedback, ideas, RFC's, and simply communicating with us on GitHub, etc can really help getting these great ideas flowing.
Every day, we try and work with Framework Authors, users, contributors, even browser vendors to try and empathize on a variety of different levels to understand what we can do to continue to innovate not only the performance, and internals, but also public facing API's.
To be honest, the passion burning through this paragraph makes me believe you'd be a huge positive impact on webpack through your ideas and contributions. Doesn't have to be code either, bring your best skills, and make some real positive impact on the 5million users and 9million monthly downloads that use webpack.