Comment by lmm
8 days ago
> What are you writing in React if not HTML tags and CSS classes?
UIs made of React components. I try to avoid having to know or care about the underlying implementation details.
8 days ago
> What are you writing in React if not HTML tags and CSS classes?
UIs made of React components. I try to avoid having to know or care about the underlying implementation details.
> I try to avoid having to know or care about the underlying implementation details.
This feels quite ignorant. I'm not sure, in some ways I understand it, for example, when running software on the JVM, I typically don't think about how it's implemented, so I share some of that ignorance.
At the same time, specializing to just knowing one technology (e.g. React) and not caring about up or down the stack can also be limiting - both for any career moves (Vue? Angular? working with how the resources are packaged and deployed?) as well as just debugging things in more detail (since one can feasibly imagine cases where you need to look at both the output HTML/CSS/JS to understand why certain things are happening, not just a React plugin in DevTools).
You don't have to learn things that are of no value right now, but you probably shouldn't go out of your way to not learn things. Staying curious is generally pretty nice!
I mean, sure, I do actually know a bunch of the details and it's occasionally useful for debugging. But I look for ways to work at the React level if possible (e.g. using the React dev tools to debug the component hierarchy rather than using the raw browser dev tools where possible). IME it's better to fully specialise in a small set of technologies than to dabble across a wider range.
And what are in those components? Divs with a className property I assume? Or are you literally only using components other people have made in UI libraries with no changes of your own?
I generally use preexisting components, there's not a lot of value add in creating my own date picker or dropdown box or whatever. Obviously I put my own content in, and compose together existing components to make bigger new components if the component I want doesn't exist (e.g. if I couldn't find an address entry component I might make one out of individual text entry components). I think some of the components I use might actually be or correspond to "basic" HTML tags, but that doesn't make any difference at the point of use.
If a component doesn't have built-in styling support (i.e. configurable via React properties) then I'll use Tailwind so I can at least ignore all the selectors and cascading nonsense of CSS. (I remain hopeful that the world will eventually see that inline styling is the way to go; with Tailwind I meet them halfway)
Okay, well you do realize you're not the average programmer right? I'd even say this is junior level if you are not really creating your own code and components, so it's not accurate to say that HTML and CSS are not "necessary" unless you're doing what seems to be very basic work. And Tailwind is still CSS, again, so without knowing what things like flex actually do, you can't use Tailwind either. I'm beginning to suspect you may just use AI to build much of your code for you.
2 replies →