Every now and then, a one blog post is published and it spurs a reaction or response in others that are, in turn, published as blogs posts, and a theme starts to emerge. That’s what happened this past week and the theme developed around the cost of JavaScript frameworks — a cost that, in this case, reveals just how darn important it is to use JavaScript responsibly.
Eric Bailey: Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm
This is where the story begins. Eric goes to a health service provider website to book an appointment and gets… a blank screen.
In addition to a terrifying amount of telemetry, Modern Health’s customer-facing experience is delivered using React and Webpack.
If you are familiar with how the web is built, what happened is pretty obvious: A website that over-relies on JavaScript to power its experience had its logic collide with one or more other errant pieces of logic that it summons. This created a deadlock.
If you do not make digital experiences for a living, what happened is not obvious at all. All you see is a tiny fake loading spinner that never stops.
D’oh. This might be mere nuisance — or even laughable — in some situations, but not when someone’s health is on the line:
A person seeking help in a time of crisis does not care about TypeScript, tree shaking, hot module replacement, A/B tests, burndown charts, NPS, OKRs, KPIs, or other startup jargon. Developer experience does not count for shit if the person using the thing they built can’t actually get what they need.
This is the big smack of reality. What happens when our tooling and reporting — the very things that are supposed to make our work more effective — get in the way of the user experience? These are tools that provide insights that can help us anticipate a user’s needs, especially in a time of need.
I realize that pointing the finger at JavaScript frameworks is already divisive. But this goes beyond whether you use React or framework d’jour. It’s about business priorities and developer experience conflicting with user experiences.
Alex Russell: The Market for Lemons
Partisans for slow, complex frameworks have successfully marketed lemons as the hot new thing, despite the pervasive failures in their wake, crowding out higher-quality options in the process.
These technologies were initially pitched on the back of “better user experiences”, but have utterly failed to deliver on that promise outside of the high-management-maturity organisations in which they were born. Transplanted into the wider web, these new stacks have proven to be expensive duds.
There’s the rub. Alex ain’t mincing words, but notice that the onus is on the way frameworks haved been marketed to developers than developers themselves. The sales pitch?
Once the lemon sellers embed the data-light idea that improved “Developer Experience” (“DX”) leads to better user outcomes, improving “DX” became and end unto itself, and many who knew better felt forced to play along. The long lead times in falsifying trickle-down UX was a feature, not a bug; they don’t need you to succeed, only to keep buying.
As marketing goes, the “DX” bait-and-switch is brilliant, but the tech isn’t delivering for anyone but developers.
Tough to stomach, right? No one wants to be dup
Source link