Does anyone that has been developing fe code in the past few years felt that the pace of change has been overwhelming? I think weve finally settled down on a few tried and true frameworks for frontend development.
Perhaps, but I’ve been feeling the great schism[1] happening in front end development between a more design oriented developers and the tech oriented developers. Being on the design side of the schism (what this 2014 article calls BFED) I feel unsatisfied with the current state of front end mentality (even though its settled). I feel that the pressure to use the wrong set of tools to arrive at the wrong conclusion too great. The fact that selection between these wrong set of tools is less overwhelming, feels irrelevant.
Note that there are still what I consider right tools and right conclusions. They are just under in terms of popularity and it feels like the industry is pushing me away from them.
During the last two years in frontend I've learned about and considered and or used grunt, gulp, sass, Webpack Angular 1 and Angular 2+.
In hindsight maybe the most annoying part isn't just the constant churn, but also how questions about x will be answered with: you should use y instead.
I just left a consulting shop where we didn't use the latest and greatest.
In some ways, it's sort of a blessing to avoid the javascript fatigue; however, in cases where we worked with clients with strong branding/UX guidelines with React components, it was really frustrating having to rebuild components entirely from scratch.
I think the largest changes are behind us - I think the big shift happened at the end of 2014 when Angular 2 was announced without backwards compatibility. It was also the time when Node had really been thrust forward as the backend language of choice in comparison to Ruby on Rails (from my experience).
I'm working on something new and and the whole frontend ecosystem makes me nervous. The last time I did any kind of production-level frontend work was 2004.
It feels like I woke from a coma and am trying to adjust to a new kind of world with flying cars except they don't really fly.
I mean, I feel insecure for writing CSS by hand, not using webpack/roll-up or a whole frontend build flow. I do like Mithril.js and Svelte though so perhaps I'll start using bits of that in my new project.
I don't. I've been using the exact same tech stack for the past 4+ years. Granted, that's not _that_ long but it's long enough to feel like it's table.
