I'm just so burnt out with new things. How do I combat such burnout? I really don't care about 'Htmx', I think barely any apps need much beyond what was available in ~2006 in terms of web tech. I just feel tired knowing that moving from React to Htmx is an option. Yet another option which will very possibly bring zero commercial value (although it might be a nicer dev experience I guess) to any project I ever work on. Am I wrong?
Don't look at it. There's a million new things being invented and ignored every day but for some reason if it touches web dev it 1) gets a thread 2) gets upvoted and 3) you people are near the top of every comment thread.
Whatever led to you posting that you don't care about this rather than just not even noticing it like all the new things you see every single day that don't even penetrate your consciousness. Find and kill that.
That's understandable, the front end world is extremely churny.
If you don't want to deep dive on htmx-as-a-tool due to burn out, I completely understand. But, at some point, it might make sense to read up on the philosophy behind it (hypermedia as an archiecture) because that is an area where it is different than most front end frameworks today.
Just use vanilla html/js/css. For most stuff that's fine. React is good for web applications that require reusable components and have a lot of state to manage, but if you are building a personal site just use vanilla.
Have you ever tried writing a native client? I think the native client path is something that a lot of developers don't even consider these days. I think it's an area of great opportunity.
I have no idea what that is, but since it's javascript I assume it's still running in the browser.
I'm suggesting getting out of the browser all together and writing a native client. Before Evernote moved to Electron, it's what they did. Their Windows client was written in C++ and their Mac client was Objective C.
Why not just limit your perusal of the new stuff? It's interesting enough if you're in the game to keep apprised, from a 10,000 ft pov, of what's around. A delimited once-a-day/week/whatever browse fulfils that. But stop there. Let all your further dives into new tech be driven purely by actual needs/uses (career or business or hobby etc).
The solution to the Paradox of Choice is to opt out. Human minds aren't soul-stuff magic - they're evolved systems whose history hasn't equipped them to deal fluently with unlimited choices. That's just physical reality, so we need to comport with it, not with the blandishments of the virtual business/tech world.
In many domains of contemporary life, one way to be free (and reduce anxiety) is to use volitional attention to restrict the range of choices we're presented with.
that's very true, it's an extension of HTML as a hypermedia, and you can achieve useful patterns with as few as one or two additional attributes (that are extremely symmetric with "normal" HTML).
two plain HTML attributes that give you a nice tool for deferring expensive calculations so that users can get to interactive more quickly with the rest of the page
Just stick with web standards and life will be a lot simpler. All frameworks, including React, will eventually go by the wayside, but the standards will still be there. I've been building on standard Web Components exclusively since 2015 at multiple jobs and it has sustained a very successful career so far.
I dunno, I took this advice and ended up rolling my own thing that looked an awful lot like a framework, but wasn’t as good because the framework authors are better at JS than I am.
I’ve landed on Svelte+Typescript lately, and It’s Really Doing It For Me (tm). I think the trick is to find a framework or library that gets you, and just run with it.
For me, this feeling came from trying to stay on top of all the innovation happening out at the edge of problem domains. The thing is, none of those problems at the edges applied to me. I was chasing them for the sake of chasing them.
Once I stopped chasing the outer edge of what everyone else was trying to solve, and instead focused on the problem directly in front of me, the anxiety of being on the technical treadmill went away. When I have a problem to solve, I research it. As the outer edges get figured out, they start forming boring tech. I try to keep things boring when doing research - and avoid running up the treadmill unless necessary.
I am totally with you on this. I've been a React dev for 5 years. When they release new stuff (like hooks), I just wait until it becomes unavoidable, or I need to take interviews for a new job.
I was hesitant to switch to Hooks, or Context. I only studied them when I was preparing for a new job and interviews for it.
I still feel queasy when I encounter obscure Typescript features (e.g. Omit/Pick, Generic Type Templates <T>) used in a codebase. Frontend simply does not need this much complexity....But I just google and find out. I don't personally go out of my way to bring new features into my codebases. Perhaps, only time they become unavoidable is when you're interfacing with a library or building a library to be interfaced.
I have done seriously complex computer vision stuff, 3D game development, embedded electronics. I have seen complex code where it had to be. People make frontend development more complicated than it needs to be most of the time. They just end up plastering everything with newest/coolest tech.
This is not a correct interpretation. I'd argue the basics - HTML, CSS and Javascript hasn't changed as much since 2006. jQuery came out in 2006 and we were manipulating DOM back then. Now, we have frameworks like React, where we are manipulating DOM. The only differences are new browser APIs and a much better code maintainability.
