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Comment by MatthiasPortzel

18 hours ago

React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.

> React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing

Yes, it does.

> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.

Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.

  • It's also not tautological that React apps have bad error handling. You can do proper error handling and retry logic in React, and I can't for the life of me understand why GitHub engineers making several hundred thousand a year in cash and at least that much in stock simply... don't?

    It's no wonder my jobs feed is flooded with senior engineering positions at GitHub (one wonders if they're growing, or jettisoning dead weight) but I can't imagine it's a good look for the resume to put GitHub on it at this point.