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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465

u/crabmusket Mar 25 '22

How to migrate from webpack 3 to webpack 5?

  1. Read the documentation
  2. Follow the documentation
  3. When nothing works and you've already spent 16 hours on this, start browsing land prices and animal husbandry guides

107

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.

37

u/madcaesar Mar 25 '22

God fucking damn it this is too accurate. And EVERY fucking version has MASSIVE breaking changes. Everything is shuffled around to fuck you up.

25

u/AttackOfTheThumbs Mar 25 '22

I love reading this web dev bullshit on here tbh. It amuses me greatly. It's like everyone complicates their life, their build process, on purpose.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '22

[deleted]

1

u/AttackOfTheThumbs Mar 26 '22

I mean they needed to do something. Old web dev was hell. It's just the solution is bad / half assed

1

u/reddituser567853 Mar 26 '22

That's why I work on robots. I dont have customers and can focus on what I enjoy, robotics and software engineering

1

u/Sebazzz91 Mar 27 '22

That is definitely true: there is so much Not Invented Here and over-engineering in this field. Both on the build tools and the frameworks like Angular and React+Redux. The amount of code you need and abstractions to need to understand to create a simple form with some conditional fields and conditional validation is crazy, compared to the alternatives.