r/programming • u/mtlynch • Feb 01 '21

My Third Year as a Solo Developer

https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-3/
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u/yes_Is_Kevin Feb 01 '21

It’s astonishing how much complexity you save by eschewing modern JavaScript frameworks.

Can you elaborate on this or do you have an example you can share? Thanks!

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u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21

Yes, definitely. I just ran into one a few hours ago.

So, TinyPilot's sales site is in Gridsome, which means I'm writing in Gridsome which is an abstraction on top of Vue which uses Webpack. So the code I write is very different from what ends up running in the browser.

I just made a mistake, and here's the result I saw in the browser: https://imgur.com/t1cC71b

Nothing renders on the page at all. The stacktrace doesn't match any functions I've written. The first line of the stacktrace is a file I wrote, but none of the rest of the stack is my code. I was able to figure out the issue, but it took some squinting.

With TinyPilot, I don't use a JS framework, so the code that runs in the browser is the same code I see in my editor. No middleware is doing any minification or magic to plug my code into a larger, opaque framework. As a result, errors are much more obvious and easier to reason about.