The frontend stack is a lie. Not entirely. But hear me out. Ten years ago you wrote HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You shipped a file. Users opened it. Done. Today you need a bundler, a transpiler, a type checker, a linter, a formatter, a component framework, a state manager, a data fetching layer, a router, a testing framework, and a CI pipeline to glue it all together. And every six months half of that gets replaced. Here's what nobody admits: Most of that complexity doesn't solve user problems. It solves developer problems created by the previous tool that was supposed to solve developer problems. Babel existed because browsers were slow to adopt ES6. Webpack existed because browsers had no native modules. Create React App existed because Webpack was too hard to configure. Vite existed because CRA was too slow. Turbopack exists because Vite isn't fast enough at scale. That's five tools solving the same problem in sequence. Each one genuinely better than the last. Each one adding a new mental model to maintain. The part that actually matters: None of this is inherently bad. Abstraction is how we build complex things. The problem is when the stack becomes the goal — when engineers spend more time configuring tooling than shipping features. I've worked in codebases where onboarding took two weeks just to understand the build pipeline. Not the product. The build pipeline. What I actually do now: I question every layer. Not with nostalgia — I'm not going back to vanilla JS for a production app. But with a real question: does this tool reduce complexity for the user, or just for me? If it's only for me, I'd better be sure it's worth the tradeoff. The best stack is the one your team stops thinking about. #frontend #javascript #webdevelopment #softwareengineering #react
JavaScript fatigue is real. I went back to the web from yesterday. We call it hypermedia. 🚀
I have been using a bundler, a transpiler, a linter, a formatter, testing libraries, CI pipeline 10 years ago. Nothing really changed, except most of the things are faster, more reliable and battle tested. I started using React around this time, and have returned to it after many distractions. But most of the problem today can be solved with HTML and CSS, and maybe some sprinkles of JavaScript in the shape of Web Components or https://htmx.org/