Interview With A Sr JavaScript Dev | Prime Reacts 

Hot take: "Once you know everything, it is easy"

"2024 is the year of serverlesslessness" - died

“How do you get a Javascript piece of code under 1MB?” The fact that this a real question that people actually have to ask hurts my feelings.

The JS ecosystem gives me so much PTSD that if I see a json file I just rename it to .lua

I realized after returning home from a three week cross-country driving journey that I needed to organize my tasks, but my kanban instance has been broken for a few months, so I thought "I should make some kind of app". Then I realized that I didn't have 20 hours to spare before getting shit done, so I thought "I should just use an Android to-do app". But then I realized that fixing my phone was one of the tasks and might involve a data wipe, so a to-do app would not work (and besides, they all suck). Finally, I had an epiphany: I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen. This mental clarity would not have been possible had I not given up writing JavaScript.

"Push on save" got me good 😭

I will admit that I googled a bunch of the things he mentioned, mostly because a part of me didn't believe that some of them were actually real. I then realized that I honestly had no interest in using any of them or really reading the docs for curiosity's sake, closed the browser tab, and moved on....

Idk but the T3 stack sounds pretty good to me

Javascript people are now not just frogs, but fully cooked in the sauce it seems.

The "Don't write this down, it will be different next week" ten minutes into this insanity was so amazing. It is at times like this I am happy I am a C dev professionally. We just upgraded to C23 at work. With that we got like 4 new really cool things (some of which I had already learned to love from coding Zig in my free time), and like 2 interesting things that I am not sure what I think about yet. That is it for like 10 years. Then we just go ahead and write software (and try not to create any memory issues or UB, I know I know...).

The solution is simple. Almost painfully so. Just use the same tools you have been using for the past few years. They work just fine, nothing is all that better or worse about other new stuff. The language is the same, everyone just adds their own flavor of abstraction on top. Ignore everything new and shiny, they just distract you from mastery.

We need to make ligma.js as the final JS Framework.

"You've heard of 8 minute abs? Well heres my idea: 7 minute abs!" Thats what the t3/t4 stacks immediately made me think of

13:00 "don't write this down, next week this is all going to change" had me spit my coffee out. Lmao!

and thats exacly why i wanna as far away as possi le from web development and front end.

Love the take towards the end of the video. Just do what keeps you coming back.

I just find it fascinating that every single new JS framework is always just compromised in some way. Like, it works all good, but then you encounter your first "bubble gum solution" the framework has to use to do its thing. Then another. Then another. So much of JS libraries feel extremely hacky and like they're going to explode any second.

I dunno, I just use Laravel. It has everything I might need. I just upgraded my projects from v10 to v11 and it took under half an hour.

Dammit, when I saw the title I thought you actually interviewed the guy, which would have been amazing. Imagine Prime interviewing him while he remains in his character as js dev, that would be top content right there

Really appreciate the reflection at the end. Very often I get the urge to really try to learn and know about everything in the dev world... and I forget that it's just as imposible as useless.

Very good advice. I've been building a project for the past three years. Sticking with it consistently has changed who I am so much that I can't even begin to compare what I knew starting out to what I've experienced in these years. I used to leave a lot of projects unfinished, jumping on many different tangents. But once I stuck to this particular passion project, it really started to pay off. (By the way, the project will soon go public and hit v1.0.0!)

try picom for screen tearing?

re: rolling your own auth -- I did the same when I was just a hobbyist. Not hard at all, and I'd rather spend time learning the fundamentals than the idiosyncracies of some service like cognito.

I am embedded systems engineer and my new hobby is web apps. At work, I debug very low level issues, designing my own graphics pixel by pixel, etc... For my hobby project I use JS, React and Strapi. All I do in that project so far is to read documentation and figure out how to plug in things, what library to use, etc... I have fun, but I feel similar to 10 years ago when I was just using Arduino libraries, very far from knowing why it is the way it is.

I've been waiting for another one of these since you reacted to the first one!

"don't write this down it's all going to change next week anyways"

The analogy of the boiling frog is perfect. To try to combat this I have been learning how to build website/apps limiting myself to tech that was available at a certain time period and progressively adding newer and newer technologies. Hopefully this will help me understand the "why" of each abstraction layer that has been added over the years.

Hot take I would rather go to a job with old technology but reliable, good documentation and community. Than a job which is unfamiliar with the technology they use. The one of problem with JS is that everyone wants to be the next innovator.

that analogy with the boiled frog is exactly how i described it as an SRE talking about all the tools that are just layered abstractions one on top of each other. good to know im not the only one who sees it that way.

I find it funny but understandable how shortly after the quip about chat's views on Sentry, I get a Sentry ad.

"Support any database...If you know how to write the adapter". That made me laugh lol

To anyone looking to role their own auth, there’s an amazing chapter in “Let’s Go” that details how one would go about it using Go. After reading the chapter Auth just made sense and it’s no longer scary.

100% agree on understanding the protocol before using the first library you see Especially since there are now so many implementations

zustand is real. We use it for work and I thought it was made up too. Apparently it's just German

General knowledge is the best kind of knowledge because if you have it, you can add specificity easily, but to infer generalities from specificities can often be impossible or best case - really, really, REALLY hard. That's why most times someone manages to do it (like Newton, Einstein, Darwin ets.) they get immortalized.

His monologue at the end is 100% correct. Literally got my current job by talking about a crappy hardware project I was working on to solve something in my life, nothing to do with the software job the interview was for.

As a person that has been happily programming as a hobby for two-decades now and has exclusively worked on desktop apps and video games... this is why I don't care to enter the industry at this point. There's no paycheck that could ever be big enough to make me give a crap about all of this stuff. I just want to make useful programs and fun games.

Link to video in description leads to wrong one (2 years ago, not the 2024 version)

I’ve been teaching myself game and desktop app dev. JavaScript really scares me.

I also watch this video before and I am watching it again becoz I was waiting for your review of this video

My god this is exactly my life as a dev and I have only been working like three months in the industry. Like EXACTLY my life.

"Prisma blocks the package, just like this companies HR Dept." 😂

Thank you my good Sir for the eye-opening advices at the end of your video ❤

when i started programming, i thought I was goin to have my head down while typing out php or javascript to create websites. now, its more about picking the right package/framework and managing dependencies and breaking changes and working around package limitations. for reference, I learned on LAMP stack, then learned MERN.

What every interviewer wants to see: Passion

The Boiled Frog analogy applies to Senior vs Junior devs as well. Very good analogy and also describes many of the challenges facing junior developers today. That's why bootcamps are in general harmful for training engineers as they tend to neglect the "why" of why things are done the way they are.

“We push on save” is my spirit process

Amazing advice. I’m a senior CS student and have been doing web dev on my own for around 8 months now. Abstraction will hurt you if you don’t know what is going on behind the scenes

idk its faster to ship and iterate so why not? tech stacks are part of coding, web has deeper stacks bc its the most used and needs to meet a lot of different requirements. a framework does the work of figuring out the right degree of modularity and separation of concerns, it gives you a way to look at a project that could otherwise be completely undoable with resource constraints

I would love to see Oauth done from scratch in these 50 lines of code. Not that I doubt that it can be done, I think it could be done but I've never worked in an environment where that was even an option. I think it would be cool basically.

"Push on save" - a new mantra for me.

I once sat in a meeting with the Senior and Lead once. They were planning for a new project and they were discussing all these new technologies that I haven’t even heard of and some which I heard but haven’t used. Suffice to say, I was sitting there staring blankly at the whiteboard. I have never felt that out of place ever 😂

lol the end xD conflict .. solved .. struggle ..

that video cemented me not doing modern web dev. sticking to plain js.

"Dont write this down, next week all this will change. " 😅 this got me

Me, still writing vanilla JS after 20 years and only using PostCSS to be able to use nesting: "Fucking hipsters!"

Man I'm still waiting for the drizzle docs xD

Two of my favorite RU-vidrs in one video. What could be better than this?

as a beginner hobyist with 1 month of experience, choosing a framework seems like the most vibes based decision you could make. Like sure react is the most popular but vue sounds cooler and thus wins. I havent gotten into any framework yet except rawdogging js,css,html but when i do its probably gonna be vue because it just sounds cooler, svelte sounds nice but difficult for some reason, the vibes are confusing if you will

I implemented OAuth 2.0 with Authorization Grant flow, for our company and it turned out all right,! No third part libraries or services

1st world JavaScript problem. Back in Soviet Russia ... Ahem back in Kenya, it does not matter how easy clerk, vercel so long as however is paying sees > $3 You got to make it work in a shared hosting plan , which in my experience, you roll out your own everything cause external libraries are not compatible with the Node env in cPanel But sadly the delusion from the west has crept into the east, had an internal who literally asked paraphrasing.. "How do you deploy without Vercel & do auth without next auth? Can't we convince the client to pay for Vercel?" I'm happy to report that we had a lengthy the talk about ssh, scp, ftp, pm2, cookies & sessions etc etc I'll have to put a good share of blame to code camps where in 6 months you graduate as a senior developer with dollar signs on your eyes.

No matter what people say, reinventing wheels is lot's of fun and a great way to truly learn fundamental concepts.

ending message was golden

Finding something you actually want to make is the best advice you can get for learning and just coding daily. For getting a job, the thing you want to make should demonstrate your abilities to solve business problems. Since that's what they're hiring you for. If what you want to make also does that, best of both worlds. But if you're just learning or having fun, don't worry about that. Making a portfolio of projects the solve business problems is like lifting for a competition. Building projects to learn or have fun is lifting to be healthy. You do it differently for different purposes.

Was really hoping the end would be “The sigh-agen”

What happens at a job is often also different of what job post states and recruiter checks.

Serverlesslessness - brilliant! In reality, loads of job descriptions require frameworks first and then language knowledge.

Rn im making a my own version of grep in go, it finds files, finds things in files. Can replace those patterns in files. Very fun. I hope I never become a webdev. Seems like most of the things you learn are inconsequential.

'i wasted a bunch of time reinventing the wheel and why you should too'

I started on Visual Basic, modifying the Snake game. I probably never would have gotten into programming if this was thrown at me.

Hot tales are just “don’t be lazy understand your stack better”

Great video!

Isn’t the danger with rolling your own user/password auth really subtle bugs? Things like timing attacks and stuff like that?

Hypothetically if I made a game engine/rendering system, how would that come across when applying for jobs unrelated to games/rendering?

without a diagram just a simple list of the stack of ~5 or so libraries is pretty great. and the miracle is theyre all mostly interopable with each other

and this is why i will literally in any language from scripting to embedded to oop to functional to assembly but never anything that has JS in it

JS under 1 meg? Use vanilla with minification on final product, CDN external libraries if any are used (preferably as few as necessary), and enable output compression on server config. Even better, minimize JS use to as little as absolutely necessary, including preferably replacing backend JS with something more performant and actually built for server-side processing.

I made Snake in React as a "just make something" project. I thought I didn't want to use React since im a Chad standard web components kinda guy, but it was actually a good learning experience.

Missed the live, was authoring t5

Oh man, the moo tools hit me hard.

solid advice

The ending seems so based!

I only started 2 years ago, with AlpineJS. I was writing production code immediately since I was UX with devs that were slow and shit. I think picking something small that works and going from there is fine. Coming in immediately to "make app" is stupid, and causes you to overextend and pick random things that make no sense and you don't know what anything is for.

I was wondering when you'd react to this. 😁

"We push on save" :D

Thank god I did not took the JS/TS route when I was choosing between JS/TS and Python

Primes take at 20:00 was spot on. The last 2 jobs I've worked within the last 4 years both ran .NET 4 + jQuery.

For behavioral interviews, I started making everything up. It felt glorious

Javascript is easy to ship under 1MB on the edge thanks to tools like webpack and esbuild. Split every route of your API into its own bundle and they sit around 500kb

I've been doing webdev for about a year and I don't feel like a programmer, I feel like a customer of the company with the programs I use, programs written by programmers

Prime is hands down the best motivational speaker. Period.

"get the oauth library".. me: he talkin about fetch?

dude I'm pretty sure that's the wework in Berlin Mitte

What is the Twitter @ address for Drizzle?

19:00 Git started to git started 🤔 Just git it dude!

Kai's recent interviews with actual founders are brilliant. Highly recommended.

I have yet to see a JS application where simple things like auth, connecting to the database, putting a checkbox on the page took less than 2-4 weeks for the Sr dev. That being said, using anything else, to get those same things with python, PHP, C#, JQUERY, Plain JS, Bootstrap, HTML took under a day per task. Usually under an hour. Appearance of the website was the same. Were the other languages more scalable?....depends for who? Do you have smaller servers no, but you aren't relying on your user having a beefy laptop I think the thing we screw up in the development is we are all about "do it all on the front end" or "do it all on the backend" when the reality their should be a balance. Most of these front-end frameworks seem to forget this.

Thanks flip, never doubt our love for you.

Tbh it's absolutely the same in the backend / devops world. Almost none of the libs, tools or frameworks I used 10 years ago are still available or a good idea due to continue using. Only language itself prevails but that doesn't mean much because it also changed.

They didn’t teach me this in the boot camp