HACKER Q&A
📣 karolinepauls

Are there any non-SPA front end developers left?


Back in "my days" we would get an in-house web designer to create assets, styles, and a demo HTML document demonstrating all necessary components to implement the planned content.

We would then break down the demo HTML into templates, which we would render in the backend, and work from there.

There would be JS for interactive components - first Knockout (viewmodels, terrible idea), then React (which would let you separate the state from presentation).

Backend templates + React frontend components was IMO the optimum, as long as your POST handling logic was sensible and data-oriented rather than some OO nightmare (https://wtforms.readthedocs.io/en/3.2.x/fields/#the-field-base-class).

You didn't have to implement the API separately from the frontend to later discover that your frontend developer worked really... fast. And implemented their own understanding of the problem domain. These days, if you're super unlucky, you discover that your frontend has been blessed with some non-standard component wrappers, which wrap components, which wrap components, which wrap... And somehow types in TS docs still have no links, so good luck finding what they mean by TData, especially if TData comes from a different codebase.

tl;dr: The tldr is in the title. I want sanity back :D

  👤 cranberryturkey Accepted Answer ✓
I'm starting to get into building .onion sites and my general experience is people on Tor all have js disabled. So I'm looking for a js-free framework that works with node.js (ironically)
👤 leakycap
SPA development is everywhere because you can charge a lot more for it, and web development has become commoditized in many other arenas

Sanity is available immediately if you are willing to be paid less. There are tons of simple, non-SPA, non-stack-on-stack projects out there, they just usually pay 1/10th the complex stuff.

👤 austin-cheney
I prefer to develop SPAs for personal use but with vanilla JS. My goal is both scalability, performance, and accessibility. Its hard to find employment that values things like high performance and test automation, so I switched to a different kind of software for employment where I was quickly elevated into management.

I don't want to go back to JavaScript for employment so long as its riddled with unnecessary abstraction/dependency nonsense. While I did get tired of solving for the numerous problems that shouldn't exist in the first place I got more tired of insecure peers who were always quick to point fingers. I don't have to worry about that any more.

👤 decafninja
As recently as 2020 I know there were a decent number of old school ASP.NET sites at various Wall Street investment banks (and devs maintaining and even building new features for them).

I don’t know if that’s still the case.