<story><title>The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks</title><url>https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2020-04-21-the-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aardvark1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve working at large F100 financial services companies as an engineer and technical manager for 10 years. I&amp;#x27;ve seen front ends built using a myriad of techniques and frameworks.&lt;p&gt;Leaving bytes and bundle weight aside, in 2020 JS frameworks like React are far and away the best approach for front-end engineering from a large organizational standpoint.&lt;p&gt;1)Not difficult to hire for. JS frameworks are currently in the sweet spot where they&amp;#x27;re both widely popular and &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot;. Consequently it&amp;#x27;s not hard to find good candidates. That wasn&amp;#x27;t the case 5 years ago where React&amp;#x2F;Angular developers were still uncommon.&lt;p&gt;2) The HUGE and helpful community of developers. There are so many excellent resources for learning and solving problems with JS frameworks. JS developers are eager to show off on medium and similar sites. I&amp;#x27;ve never seen such a large and enthusiastic community. This will inevitably subside as JS fall out of favor but I hope it doesn&amp;#x27;t for a long time.&lt;p&gt;2)Rapid UI development. The JS ecosystem make it easy to build UIs quickly that don&amp;#x27;t completely suck and look good for the ever-important demos to senior leadership.&lt;p&gt;3)Opinionated frameworks naturally enforce best practices and ensure relatively consistent architecture. This makes it easy to move engineers from one team to another and make grokking new codebases a lot easier. New engineers are productive quickly and begin creating value for the company. This was not the case with the inevitable jquery monstrosities that resulted after a critical mass of code or # of engineers.&lt;p&gt;4)Fewer bugs. JS ecosystem makes it very easy to write unit and integration tests.&lt;p&gt;Companies with IT budgets that are 9+ figures will happily pay for extra bytes across the wire in exchange for those benefits</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fooey</author><text>One of my main things I argue strongly for on any new project is &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t do anything weird&amp;quot;. Don&amp;#x27;t use weird fringe languages, don&amp;#x27;t use weird fringe frameworks. If the thing you want to do doesn&amp;#x27;t exist, think real hard about why it does not.&lt;p&gt;At my office, we&amp;#x27;ve somehow ended up with a critical graphql server that&amp;#x27;s written entirely in Kotlin, which is &lt;i&gt;cool&lt;/i&gt; but completely impossible to hire for or get any kind of community support for it. It feels like absolutely everything you want it to do, you have to do build yourself, whereas if we&amp;#x27;d used a normal off the shelf graphql server it all already exists.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m so sick of maintaining old weird forks and unnecessary custom code that doesn&amp;#x27;t need to exist.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks</title><url>https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2020-04-21-the-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aardvark1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve working at large F100 financial services companies as an engineer and technical manager for 10 years. I&amp;#x27;ve seen front ends built using a myriad of techniques and frameworks.&lt;p&gt;Leaving bytes and bundle weight aside, in 2020 JS frameworks like React are far and away the best approach for front-end engineering from a large organizational standpoint.&lt;p&gt;1)Not difficult to hire for. JS frameworks are currently in the sweet spot where they&amp;#x27;re both widely popular and &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot;. Consequently it&amp;#x27;s not hard to find good candidates. That wasn&amp;#x27;t the case 5 years ago where React&amp;#x2F;Angular developers were still uncommon.&lt;p&gt;2) The HUGE and helpful community of developers. There are so many excellent resources for learning and solving problems with JS frameworks. JS developers are eager to show off on medium and similar sites. I&amp;#x27;ve never seen such a large and enthusiastic community. This will inevitably subside as JS fall out of favor but I hope it doesn&amp;#x27;t for a long time.&lt;p&gt;2)Rapid UI development. The JS ecosystem make it easy to build UIs quickly that don&amp;#x27;t completely suck and look good for the ever-important demos to senior leadership.&lt;p&gt;3)Opinionated frameworks naturally enforce best practices and ensure relatively consistent architecture. This makes it easy to move engineers from one team to another and make grokking new codebases a lot easier. New engineers are productive quickly and begin creating value for the company. This was not the case with the inevitable jquery monstrosities that resulted after a critical mass of code or # of engineers.&lt;p&gt;4)Fewer bugs. JS ecosystem makes it very easy to write unit and integration tests.&lt;p&gt;Companies with IT budgets that are 9+ figures will happily pay for extra bytes across the wire in exchange for those benefits</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ng12</author><text>Absolutely agreed. I have never in my life had a stakeholder get on my case because our site was 3mb when it could have been 1mb. I have had many stakeholders get on my case because we couldn&amp;#x27;t turn around features fast enough, or the site was buggy, or our UX was worse than our competitors. Those are the things that the people who pay me and my team care about and if I could 10x our bundle size for a 1.5x improvement in development speed I would do it in a heartbeat.</text></comment>