I just read this today, almost one year after being published. I’m a self-taught front end developer that came to JS from flash and AS2/3. At the beginning I was fine with jQuery and the first releases of responsive CSS frameworks. Then it came the first release of Angular and everyone was talking about it. I went to the angular official documentation and I felt just like the guy in this article, completely lost and looking to understand what was I reading.
Now, after almost two years of learning ES6+, Gulp, Browserify, React, Angular, Babel, Webpack, SASS, Compass, GSAP, PIXI, Unit testing (which could have it’s own article) etc., I’m capable of using most of this tools and I’m still trying to understand why my node_modules folder is 150 MB to create a simple SPA, I mean nothing too fancy, just a simple app.
My point is Charlotte, that perhaps learning all of this stuff was easy for you, but there are many people out there, new to all of this and the amount of information regarding the JS ecosystem is quite overwhelming and sometimes makes you feel lost or wanting to throw it all away and become a sheep herder or something else.
One can never become so self-aware and forget that there are people in this world with less information in their brains (but perhaps more knowledge and wisdom) that learn at different rates and all the information about web development can be a bit frightening.
Finally the main issue that we all should be aware is that now a days, becoming a specialized developer is almost impossible. I’m not against different frameworks, because they fill very specific needs and in a good way. But is almos impossible as well, keep up with everything that comes up, just take a couple of minutes about how things have changed in the last 10 months since this article was written.
Best, Rodrigo.
