Agreed! I assume the reason for the forgetting of the features is that at least some were poorly supported when first released so developers create workarounds that then become the de facto standard.
It has been amazing to see the speed up in release and support of new CSS features over the last couple of years! Even the masonry layout has finally reached an experimental stage
Yup, at this point it feels more like habit than necessity. People learned to build things like dropdowns in JavaScript years ago, so they keep doing it that way.
A lot of devs simply don’t look any further when it comes to what HTML and CSS already provide.
That exactly describes me. I'm not a good frontend person. I got really, really good at building desktop GUIs in Swing (Java) back in the day and really imprinted on that way of doing things. When moving to web, I found the the display landscape really challenging to grok. I read a few books and got to where I could get most of what I wanted done, but it always took me way longer than it felt like it should, and certainly much longer than it took my coworkers. In that period I learned the contemporary patterns of the day and got pretty good at using component libraries with frameworks like React and was finally able to make things look and behave more like I wanted them to.
Because at that point so much of the focus was on javascript and component libs/frameworks, I didn't (and mostly still don't) really follow browser development. I looked into things like web components when they were first talked about but found their DX to be quite sub-par (it was still pretty early days) and haven't really looked again.
I'm personally much more interested in systems, infrastructure, devops, and all things backend, so for me frontend is a necessary evil to enable me to surface controls for my stuff to users. It's not that I don't want to stay up to speed and current, it's more that in my limited bandwidth I'm more focused on what I care about. That leads to exactly the pattern you described: I learned and got comfortable with a certain paradigm in a different time, and those ways are quite engrained.
Anyway, thank you for your comment. It really helped me identify a blind spot I previously had (which I intend to rectify) :-)
Thanks for sharing that! It’s a super common story. Frontend patterns moved fast (especially for the last 3 years), and not always in a way that encouraged checking what the browser itself could already do.
If you want to improve a bit and discover more what CSS and HTML can do today, I also try to post daily on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosoti/
Sure. This is an internal web app that uses react on the front end and rails on the back end. Typical examples I see LLM success with are writing and writing up routes/controllers/models, writing specs for those, abstracting components, writing front-end vitest/storybook entries. A typical request (filenames and such redacted) is like: "We recently added <link to model>. We refactored our approach for <goal> to <link to different model file>. We need to refactor <A> to be like <B> in these ways. Do that, then update the spec to match the pattern in <file Y>. Run rspec and rubocop when done, and address any issues". I then either wait or go do something else, then review the code and either ask for follow up, or fix minor issues. Sometimes it follows the wrong pattern and I ask it to adjust, or simply git checkout -- and say try again you did Y wrong.
Roughly speaking that is how I think through my work, and when I get to the point of actually writing the code having most of the plan (context) in my head, I simply copy that context to the LLM then go to do something else. I only do this if I believe the LLM can do it effectively, so some tasks I do not ask for help at all on (IMHO this is important).
I also have it help with scripts, especially script that munge and summarize data. I know SQL very very well, but find it still a bit faster to prompt the LLM if it has the schema on hand.
Do you find ^ helpful? i.e does that match how you prompt and if not, in what ways does it differ? If it does, in what ways do you get different results and at what step?
As a fullstack web engineer I've never had to implement a tree structure at work. I'd love to hear examples of what kinds of companies/platforms people are writing these structures regularly. If anyone is willing to share where they use them I'd appreciate it
I've used them (though more generally a directed acyclic graph) when doing certain kinds of analysis of code execution paths (working in embedded software). They do tend to show up in UI work as well (in an ad-hoc, implicit fashion), in my experience, though generally when you're looking at something across the whole UI as opposed to implementing a specific element of it. I've also used them in a somewhat ad-hoc build-system like utility as well.
(And to be clear, none of these involve sitting down and writing some generic Tree<T> structure, they're all cases of "Well, there's some tree-like datastructure that already exists or is a natural fit for this system and I'm going to be traversing it depth-first or breadth-first to do something to the elements of it or calculate something based on what nodes I pass through on a given traversal")
You might not implement them but as a web engineer you're using them all the time. So all these tools that you use will have tree implementations in them.
- Every html document is a tree structure. And css documents have special syntax to address nodes within those trees
- If it's any good, you're routing framework probably uses some kind of tree to quickly match the request to it's handler
- The database you write to uses a tree to quickly find the location it needs to write to
I think that’s kind of the GP’s point, that there’s no “implementing a tree” so much as just using the tree that’s naturally there. When I make nested objects, I don’t think of trees or some boxes-and-arrows diagram, I just think “product type”. It’s good to know your graph algorithms, sure, but thinking about the data representation isn’t something one needs to have in the front of their mind in any decently abstracted language.
I still find the DevEx of serverless terrible compared to the well-established monolith frameworks available to us.
The YAML config, IAM permissions, generating requests and responses, it's all so painful to get anything done.
Admittedly I speak as a software engineer primarily building CRUD apps, where frameworks have had decades of development. I can see use cases for event-driven applications where serverless may make life easier. But for CRUD, currently no chance.
Serverless can be useful for very specific tasks, such as processing files you upload, things that should happen in the background, but if you already have a simple monolith web app, I don't see why going serverless just to go serverless will help you.
I do see its usefulness, but its not a one size fits all tool.
I find serverless to be a breeze, with zero sysadmin costs compared to setting up VPS, EC2, doing your own custom monitoring, etc. Each to their own, however.
And gateway+lambda is a near perfect "dumb crud" app, though it is not without a startup cost.
There is no good reason to build a distributed monolith. You can always think of/design your monolith as a collection of (micro-)services and get the best of both worlds.
I find FaaS best when needing to automate something completely unrelated to what goes in to serving the customer. Stuff like bots to report CWV metrics from DataDog to a Slack channel.
There are interesting positive/negative (it hasn’t been researched enough yet) side effects on the effects this has in raising the pH of the ocean, potentially reversing ocean acidification
Finding a reason to regularly meet up. It takes away the mental load of having to arrange a time to meet up. Do X with someone weekly/monthly and you’ll become friends if you get on.
I agree with this. I moved to a new city and struggled to make friends. I’m a natural introvert and kinda shy so reaching out for friendships doesn’t come naturally to me.
But I joined a language school class and made friends there. I joined a basketball team and made friends there too.
It seems weird but I’m starting to think that it’s as simple as if you interact someone once a week for a decent period of time and their personality is kinda compatible with yours then you become friends.
So if I was looking to make friends now, I’d look for a group activity with a weekly commitment that involves people who are likely to share some common interests.
It has been amazing to see the speed up in release and support of new CSS features over the last couple of years! Even the masonry layout has finally reached an experimental stage
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