For months now I have been thinking about the design of a web front end for a collection services. There are *SO MANY CHOICES* out there that it’s sometimes difficult to turn off the incoming streams and make a choice. The exercise of thinking about a design often starts with thinking about frameworks. Code frameworks, primarily written for Javascript with a few for Python, do a bunch of work for you. But there’s a price. Frameworks are often large and regularly force you to implement things in one and only one way. Frameworks are not compatible with one another, so a choice locks you into a heavy investment. Should we use NodeJS? React? Flask? The list is seemingly endless.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a podcast that takes an alternate approach. The guest on the show, Chris Ferdinandi, asserts that the conversation need not start with a framework. He acknowledges the fact that it can be overwhelming to thinking about frameworks. In some cases, it’s better to just use JavaScript directly. The code is smaller. There’s no framework lock-in. And JavaScript has come a long way from the state it was in several years ago that led to the proliferation of frameworks for it. To help people figure out what to do, Ferdinandi created a website, Go Make Things, where we can find small guides to help us learn to do things *without* resorting to frameworks.
The podcast uses quite a bit of jargon. I didn’t understand it all. But I did find the exposure to another way of thinking to be very helpful. I plan to check out Ferdinandi’s website.
Go Make things:
Hanselminutes podcast:
https://www.hanselminutes.com/598/maybe-just-use-vanilla-javascript-with-chris-ferdinandi
Wright Turn 