🌶️🥵Many people consume Facebook meta company’s tech stack wholesale, don’t know how to actually traditionally program their way out of a paper bag, and web dev and devops caused a massive layoff (250k people) at the end of 2022, start of 2023 because it was all vaporware. They consume the same software in droves if the other guy uses it.

There is an entire subculture around it that is just a bunch of medium.com writers, YouTubers and twitter handles just trying to get the clicks for their ad money. Some of these guys have never written valid software or done anything noteworthy. If you meet them head on you’d find they have enormous egos and can’t find a counter argument when presented with reason.

I’ll even add on that there are many programmers who don’t know how to code outside a web app.

Why is something like [react, graphql, react ssr, devops, tailwind, unit tests, containers] vaporware?

• there are other frameworks even with component libraries that are easier to read the code for large codebases, better maintained, and have cohesive full stack solutions, and even faster to develop in, to name one quasarJS or even just plain ecmascript
• if you look at the anatomy of these enterprises using these solutions they’ve evolved to have micro front ends requiring armies of workers.
• devops is a sales term, the actual implementation of it is so contextual that you’d probably find you don’t need a full time job for it half the time and most are relatively easy to setup inside of a business quarter
• not everything is Facebook scale: unless you’re padding your resume why did some of these get adopted? How complicated does your app need to be? Did you really need to transpile JavaScript for it?
• unit tests were code to test your code that you’re going to have to functionally test anyways: you’re telling me that you have to write your code…twice? How the hell did this ever get justified to mangers? Why did the culture not evolve into literal automated smoke tests of the actual builds, instead of testing whether a function that is probably type annotated is going to fire anyways???
• docker/containers suck ass: great that they solved a problem but created a whole new one. we moved to python and JS which were JIT without artifacts and suddenly everything needs a generalized build system to run it. C lang variants and Rust lang compile to a binary you can just run… Ship the small ass binary not an entire container to run your shitty web app

You know the stuff I don’t hear about?

• Javascript and Python were steps in the evolution but never the end goal. I’d even say the same of java. There are new solutions but JavaScript in the browser especially should be replaced.
• eye appeal is buy appeal
• that eye appeal shouldn’t always mean you need to use a library or framework; vanilla apps work okay too.
• binaries/artifacts/installer packages > containers
• automated testing of the actual end product
• well written logging to the point someone can tell what the application was doing without seeing code
• using all these compsci algorithms to actually write new products and searches from scratch instead of being a framework baby: do you actually need ELK or Splunk for your search? Really?
• you probably don’t need MySQL for a lot of projects, I bet you an async library with sqlite would be the same for many of these projects.
• small teams with feature rich apps using SSR, the value of an SSR web app
• the value of a SPA
• the value of traditional desktop software and not using REST APIs