I spent 3 years thinking jQuery and Webpack were just "how web dev works." Turns out, they were just what every tutorial copy-pasted. Here's what changed my mind: I was building a project for uni and others too. Followed a popular guide online. Ended up with a Webpack config I didn't fully understand, build times that made me dread saving a file, and a jQuery dependency for something the browser could do natively. Then one of my colleagues told me to try Vite. Build time dropped to seconds. The config was 10 lines. I actually understood my own setup. That's when it hit me — I wasn't using these tools because they were the best option. I was using them because nobody told me there was a better way. As a CS Background student, nobody warns you that some of the most "popular" tools in tutorials are the ones the industry is quietly moving away from. The hardest skill isn't learning new tools. It's unlearning the ones you were taught without question. What tool did YOU hold onto way too long? 👇 Be honest — no judgment here. #JavaScript #WebDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #Frontend #CSStudent #TechCareers #Programming #CareerGrowth
jQuery‑driven AJAX + script tags took way too long. Moving to fetch/axios + a proper module bundler (Vite/Rollup) made network flows, error handling and code‑splitting much more easy
I'll start: for me it was Webpack. Spent weeks trying to debug a config I didn't write and didn't understand. The day I switched to Vite I genuinely felt like I'd been lied to 😅 What's yours? Drop it below 👇 Seniors, students, everyone welcome.