I was thinking about the sentiment you might see when something new is introduced. “Oh no, another thing to learn, why can’t we stop.”
And while I get the frustration I also wonder. Are there people who genuinely expect that they’ll be able to stop learning in this field?
Like, another JS library. Of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be? I would be concerned if there are no new ideas being tried. What did you expect, that there’s a limited number of things to learn and then you’re done for the rest of your career? That’s not how it works.
I think maybe the sentiment here may actually be directed against inexperienced project leads. Who might be overly tempted to jump between solutions and impose new things on their team. That can be frustrating.
Another frustrating aspect may be the moving targets in hiring. Like you don’t pass the interview if you don’t know some trivia about a particular tool. And those change every year. That’s demoralising. Especially if you feel your toolset may be outdated.
I also totally understand how it can be frustrating if you went into the industry expecting concrete knowledge to stay stable. I just think it’s a wrong expectation and we shouldn’t be giving that impression when teaching.
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i feel bittersweet sharing i’m leaving my job at meta in a few weeks. working in the react org at meta has been an honor. i am thankful to my past and present colleagues for taking me in, letting me make mistakes, helping me see my strengths, being kind, and sharing their time.
for the past three years, i kept saying i’d leave “in a year or so” but the moment never felt right. i wanted to (1) finish the new docs and (2) see a broadly usable Suspense data fetching integration shipping. after years of work from the team, both have shipped this spring.
i felt hesitant leaving earlier because not too long ago, leaving meta used to mean leaving the react team. that would feel too sad for me. but it is not true anymore. react has become a multi-company project, and there are several independent engineers on the team too.
fwiw i expected the article to be clickbait (and the title is) but it’s actually pretty balanced. imo it gets a few things wrong so i’ll provide an alternative perspective (tiny thread)
the framing of “existing features like useState / react-query / CSS-in-JS don’t work” is misleading at best.
to understand why, consider that here is the React you already know…
… in the RSC paradigm, all of these things keep working! we are not *replacing* that layer — we are adding a *new* layer that can run at the build or request time. that’s Server Components. the only thing they can do is pass data to the “React you already know”…
yeah i thought this was nice. idk if “spatial computing” will catch on or will stay as an apple-esque “we’re too good to use the industry terms” thing, but i thought it’s funny that this launch simultaneously validated meta’s bet *and* made meta’s branding feel instantly obsolete
mark’s meta announcement felt corny because they had to come up with a vision of mainstream aesthetics for a medium that has no mainstream community yet. of course it’s not believable! apple stuck with floating 2d stuff in the presentation because it feels familiar.
i think this is great news for meta too. i imagine it will be easier to motivate sweating the details and making them cohesive after apple resets the expectations of what this medium is supposed to feel like.
curious what the actual apple vision (not pro) looks like
vision is such a dope name for a product. focuses it on the human (what function does it serve you) rather than on the place you’re supposedly in (whatever reality). “apple vision” also kinda says “this is *the* thing we’re working on”
i mean i sorta get the point but also if a ballpen wrote stuff by itself and contained much of humanity’s collective knowledge within, maybe people would have a point being a bit more concerned about ballpens too? it’s more like a phone line with an alien made out of our voices
which is maybe fine, who knows! the internet is pretty good imo and it sure sounds a lot more dangerous than a ballpen. but like idk it’s just such a freaky vibes piece of technology, both natural and freaky like golems or acid. you don’t see language itself reanimated every day.
the closest positive emotional reference i can think of is something like talking to ancestor spirits. and even those stories typically have preexisting oracles instead of groups of people competing to discover and create them. it’s freaky
real talk. modern frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby have sort of an “SPA mode”. the main difference is with classical SPAs is that they produce several entry HTML files (per route). this means a purely static (not Node!) deploy needs a tiny URL -> path config. this trips people.
we need to get past this hurdle collectively. it is ridiculous if this is the reason we’re delaying adoption of better tools. SPAs with multiple HTML entry files are much better SPAs! we just need some standard way to deploy these across providers.
ideas welcome. i know there are scripts that generate config eg for nginx and apache. cool. i also know some providers infer these paths by default for next and gatsby. also cool. but can we have one obvious way to do it across the ecosystem? so that every single shop knows how.