Skip Navigation
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
paceaux @awful.systems
Posts 0
Comments 2
A Rant about Front-end Development

  • Yeah. That's one of the many reasons I wrote a damned rant about how fed up I am with front-end. It's insane to think web sites telling you about cars or coffee need 1MB+ to do so.

    But it happens because front-end tooling makes it so fucking easy to write complicated, bloated code.

    Most of my time and energy these days is deleting shit. I delete more than I write. But my proudest achievement was like 7 years ago when I was asked to add a Japanese font.

    Took me 6 weeks. I deleted like 15% of the CSS in the process.

    Why did it take so long, and why did it require deleting 15% of the code?

    Because the dorks on the project used Sass for literally every line. So I had like 400+ instances of someone applying a font-family spread across 80 Sass files. Not a single.fucking.HTML.element received a style. Not. One.

    There was no font-family declared anywhere that it could be inherited down.

    So over three sprints I had to move the font-declarations into mixins, then onto raw elements, then actually delete the mixins on the classes. Eventually I got it down to like 18 instances of declaring the font family.

    and then I wrote another 18 instances where I could apply the Japanese font.

    Adding a Japanese font reduced the size of the CSS by 15%.

    front-end work doesn't click with most front-end devs, either.

    •
    A Rant about Front-end Development

  • I built sites as large and larger than Toyota with a team of 4-5 devs. Even with some of them being very junior devs, we still managed to keep the CSS under 500kb.

    Lots of front-end devs don't understand the difference between complicated and complex.

    Complicated means it's difficult to do and hard to understand. Complex means it's got many parts.

    All it takes is a little bit of maturity and planning, and most any modern UI could be achieved in under 100kb of CSS. You put on your big kid pants and think about what you're going to write before you write it.

    CSS isn't some deep, level-10 arcane magic. You literally gotta roll an occasional persuasion check against a browser.

    Thanks for sharing the article, BTW

    • Frank.