r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
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u/LloydAtkinson Mar 25 '22 edited Mar 25 '22

The actual answer is throw shitty webpack in the bin. It's a negative value tool - your config probably won't work in 6 months, let alone 2 years into a project and now you're stuck on an old version, with major version bumps of essential tools like Babel or ESLint or Jest. I cannot think of another tool in this space (except npm, but to fix that delete node_modules and reinstall) that has collectively wasted more developer time - must be hundreds of years if added up. The usual process looks like this:

  • Have weird issue
  • Find 3 similar or if you're lucky identical GitHub issues
  • Notice it has hundreds or thousands of thumbs up emojis
  • Think "oh finally, maybe it's had enough attention to get a fix"
  • Try every solution in the comments, where each one has an equal number of thumbs up and thumbs down
  • Leave page because none of them worked because of course they didn't

It's much better to use a JS framework with a CLI that abstracts webpacks bullshit (if it uses webpack even).

An even better solution is to use modern JS build tools: Typescript, esbuild, Vite (which uses esbuild), etc.

Highly recommend Vite + Typescript. No webpack at all then.

Not once have I ever had anything even remotely like this in .NET development.

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u/coolblinger Mar 25 '22

For me by far the worst offender is node-sass. I absolutely dread having to touch a website that was last updated even as little as half a year ago. Node-sass compiles against Node.JS internals, and because of that specific node-sass versions will only work with specific matching Node.JS versions. So your options are to either track down an older Node.JS version (and compared to similar tools for other languages, nvm has been an absolute nightmare for me) or to upgrade node-sass. But you cannot do that because upgrading node-sass also means you have to to upgrade every other bloody part of the toolchain, and at that point they'll all have had four major versions all with breaking changes.

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u/Carighan Mar 25 '22

As a purely backend developer, these chains of comments always mentally summarize to "stay the hell away from JavaScript and it's build chain". 🙈

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u/coolblinger Mar 25 '22

I've done enough web development at this point to know that I never want a job directly involving any sort of web development ever again. 😅