Meredith Matthews @braindouche@qoto.org

The more I learn about reactjs, the more convinced I become that it's primarily a cross-browser compatibility library extremely akin to jQuery, and should be considered similarly superfluous.

I was noodling around on the react.dev homepage today, taking screencaps for a presentation I'm putting together. I had dev tools open and I noticed something odd: every time I would hover over a link, something would get fetched over the network. "That's odd, and quickly adding up to megabytes of bandwidth", I thought.

So I looked at the fetches being fired, and it appears that the website is preloading the content of the page being linked when you hover over the link. Any link, every single time.

Let me say that another way: on react.dev, every onHover over a link costs the user between 5kb and 10kb of bandwidth every single time.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Forget the fact that this website costs 2mb to download and takes 23 seconds to complete loading, how can charging the user and the app for every hover over a link be sustainable? How is this appropriate?

Just for the record, I love JavaScript modules. They make me happy.

Just got pinged by a squarespace recruiter. Anyone have a clue about squarespace as an employer?

Where is the Jacob Gellar for programming? Who are the great literary essayists for coding? Is there any creative nonfiction for software engineering? A little bit of Jeff Atwood, perhaps. Kevlin Henney, occasionally. Heydon Pickering, more often. Paul Graham. Linda Rising?

Ok fiiiine I saw the tailwind guy talk at railscon and he made a very good point that if you're templating your html a lot of your complaints about tailwind vanish and for everything else you can still write CSS and nothing stops it from being ugly anyway and frankly I respect that energy a lot

I've been handed a couple of full stack devs to help build my frontend project temporarily, and I'm finding that they're extremely weak in working with vanillaJS and regular html. I'm not surprised, exactly, but am I being unreasonable in expecting vanillaJS skills like this in the first place? Should I just plan for retraining people?

Hey can anyone remember of doom-guy John Romero is cancelled?

Programmers are so weird. It's like, our culture is viscously programmers vs management but at the same time programmers have like zero class conciousness and will actively fight you over worker solidarity.

Whenever someone complains that kids these days aren't prepared to have jobs and it's because they're on their phones too much, I recall the time before smartphones where business leaders complained that kids were on their phones too much and only knew how to type on phone keypads.

Backend developers are funny sometimes. I was talking last night with a guy on the other team. He kept insisting "this is a complex system, there are MILLIONS of entries in that db!" and he couldn't quite understand that I only care about looking at one at a time, or batches of 30 for the paginated list view, at most.

I'm not arguing that the backend isn't muscular and incredibly complex, because it is and as far as I'm concerned he's a wizard for making all that data dance efficiently. But I am front end, and all that is a black box behind an API to me and I like it that way.

Perspective will get you every time.

(Tbf he also thinks tables are incomprehensibly hard to write, so he is also kinda biased but still.)

So what can we conclude about react here?

Oh ES6 modules at runtime, why have I waited so long to embrace you?

It makes me sad that most people don't remember lonelygirl15 and what it represents, especially young fans of the now established unfiction genre. But those kids are going to keep making stuff, and masterpieces will come out over the next ten years and that is so exciting.