This is fantastic. As much as the web changes and people complain about "new frameworks" everyday, all the major frameworks are surprisingly similar.
Rethinking things from the ground up and making it smaller and more RAM efficient, is absolutely brilliant.
More frontend devs needs to stop following the herd and think for themselves and look back at how hackers used to work back in the day to use as little memory as possible.
These days I look at apps like Slack and feel such terrible sadness and despair.
Projects like Nue at least have the right spirit and attitude.
This. So glad to see there are still people who care about minimalism! I asked here on HN the other day that "why your login screen loads 6.4MB of resources" and they said that VSCode is ~200MB and gdocs is ~30MB so it's not that bad. That's the spirit these days.
I want to make things very, very differently. Not just because of the size, but maintaining a codebase with 5k lines is so much easier than maintaining 500k lines.
The problem is more in the ecosystem side than the core libraries side. Many front end devs build UIs for a day job and when they’re developing some new product requirement they don’t think twice before pulling in react-widget, react-ui-this, react-router, react-accordian. This is the main issue that creates bundle bloat and maintenance pain down the line.
Better education or being more informed would help. Knowing the basics well, like HTML and CSS, to already avoid some of the JS. Then knowing a backend language can help with actually considering simply rendering templates on the server using some template engine, like done for decades. Some knowledge about setting up a HTTP server would probably also help. Knowledge would help being able to take a step back when needed and think: "Do I actually need much interactivity here?"
Question is how we get web developers to learn those, instead of the next (ha) hyped JS frontend frameword.
We're competing with $15/hr labor. Businesses are happy to hire developers who deliver 6.4MB login pages quickly, until their customers start to complain.
I'm all about caring and using resources efficiently, and in a sense that's how we get such inefficient tech even though it's not what I mean. Money defines efficiency, and we're getting heavy apps for pretty cheap while lighter apps are more expensive in terms of specialized labor costs.
If engineers with this right attitude collectively work for rates competitive with global head shops and still deliver as quickly then we can have our light weight app cake and eat it too. I'm personally selling my services for $15/hr already, and anyone who hires me will get a pretty well engineered solution with minimal dependencies; who's with me?
Since most frontend jobs these days seem to be about having to use one of the big frameworks, I have withdrawn from frontend work mostly. I do have quite OK JS knowledge and have done things in TypeScript when I needed to. I even did explore React (and NextJS, and VueJS) stuff a bit, but it left me disappointed. I have the skills, but no motivation at all to spend time with that kind of frontend work. Until this changes, I will most likely not engage in any frontend work or "full-stack" development.
Rethinking things from the ground up and making it smaller and more RAM efficient, is absolutely brilliant.
More frontend devs needs to stop following the herd and think for themselves and look back at how hackers used to work back in the day to use as little memory as possible.
These days I look at apps like Slack and feel such terrible sadness and despair.
Projects like Nue at least have the right spirit and attitude.