Is it really worth learning a modern web stack?
When I first learned to develop for iOS, it took 3 months until I felt comfortable and productive. But it was a steady march towards something mature and well thought out. It was fun and I felt like I was growing and getting better as a developer. I look back on that time fondly.
Fast forward to late 2015, and I was excited to start all over again building modern web apps. I expected it to be the perfect marriage of familiar web technologies and the rigor of programming a true app experience that I’d learned developing for iOS. I’d built “apps” using the YUI App Framework way back in the day, so it felt like a natural fit. I was wrong.
For the past few months I’ve been writing code on a stack composed of a dizzying array of packages, acronyms, technologies, patterns, tools, choices, and alternatives. The hard work was done by Phil, who pieced together a stack that does every aspect of modern web development in a modern way, and then wrote a significant amount of application code on top of it.
For a while now I’ve been hoping for a breakthrough. Hoping to see the light or some promise in the stack. But here I am ending another week exhausted, exacerbated and thoroughly disheartened*.
I’ve tried to cheerlead for it. I’ve tried to give it time. We get the feeling this is the future, so we should embrace it. But I long to return to familiar technologies to be productive again. I long to understand what the hell is going on. I long to reload my browser and for a dev page to appear in under 10 seconds.
As I sat down to write — with a large glass of wine — I planned to share specific grievances to illustrate how frustrating this new world is, but that isn’t the point. There’s a counter point to every one of my grumbles. There’ll be npm packages I should install to solve XYZ, and I’ll need to think differently about ZYX to have the aha moment. Eventually I’ll get it. Eventually the language and tools and paradigms will fade into the background and I’ll once again be able to solve problems without fighting every step of the way. But right now it’s crushing.
More importantly, I wanted to share a moment of weakness. We’re an industry weirdly obsessed with genius and ninjas, and it’s ok not to feel like that every day. Or ever. We’re humans here at Sly Trunk, and as such we’re prone to struggling from time to time. It’s only fair that we document the bad with the good.
It’s hard for me to remember if I was ever like this with Objective C. It’s easy to forget the bad times when they’re behind you.
The thing is, it’s worth it.
It’s a valuable, humbling, challenging experience. There are smart people building these tools and technologies. Whole companies pinning their hopes on this being the future. And so there has to be something to it. Even if this doesn’t wind up being the future for long, at least we’ll have organizational experience with it and it’ll impact and inform countless decisions we make for every future project and client. It’ll make us better at writing code on other stacks and in other languages. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone, start over again, and suffer a little for your art. And if against all my instinct this turns out to be the future, well the struggle will have been all the more worthwhile.
Cheers!
*I’m planning to start running tomorrow!
