Tags: ecosystem

2019 End-of-Year Thoughts Archives | CSS-Tricks

I’m really enjoying this end-of-the-year round-up from people speaking their brains. It’s not over yet, but there’s already a lot of thoughtful stuff to read through.

There are optimistic hopeful thoughts from Sam and from Ire:

Only a few years ago, I would need a whole team of developers to accomplish what can now be done with just a few amazing tools.

And I like this zinger from Geoff:

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: it’s still the best cocktail in town.

Then there are more cautious prognostications from Dave and from Robin:

The true beauty of web design is that you can pick up HTML, CSS, and the basics of JavaScript within a dedicated week or two. But over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that building a truly great website doesn’t require much skill and it certainly doesn’t require years to figure out how to perform the coding equivalent of a backflip.

What you need to build a great website is restraint.

Why Did I Have Difficulty Learning React? - Snook.ca

When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure I was wrapping child elements properly. But overall, I felt like I grasped it well enough.

Throw in everything else at the same time, though, and things get confusing because it’s hard at first to recognize what belongs to what. “Oh, this is Redux. That is React. That other thing is lodash. Got it.”

This resonates a lot with Dave’s post:

React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.

The React is “just” JavaScript Myth - daverupert.com

In my experience, there’s no casual mode within React. You need to be all-in, keeping up with the ecosystem, or else your knowledge evaporates.

I think Dave is right. At this point, it’s possible to be a React developer exclusively.

React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.

And, as Jake points out, you either need to go all in or not at all—you can’t really incrementally add Reactness to an existing project.

Further notes on scenius

Austin Kleon expands on Brian Eno’s neologism “scenius”:

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.