I absolutely completely agree and do this myself. Unfortunately all of my peers and bosses don’t see the value, and the shop is overrun with trend chasing resume driven developers. React/node/next hosting on aws and containers and it will all be out of date next year. Everything we do has such low amount of users we don’t need anything but a single VPS and simple backend. Many of my apps from 10 years ago still run the same rails and jQuery just fine. Actually upgrading the rails versions and pulling out the jQuery dependencies is easy now too. It’s just so much simpler and works perfectly. But this is seen as detrimental to my career. It’s not appreciated. I sound like a dinosaur to the bosses and coworkers. But I enjoy it and my shit works fine. I’m saving so much time and hosting costs. Everything runs on a $40 VPS.
> React/node/next hosting on aws and containers and it will all be out of date next year.
All of these things except Next.js are over 10 years old now (Next is 8). What makes you think they'll be out of date next year?
The point of your opponent's argument is that measured age should be an indicator of maturity and stability of frameworks and toolchains.
In JavaScript, it is not. So you claiming 10 years as a time frame in your response is in bad faith, because you certainly know that code written 10 years ago is 100% incompatible with the modern versions of the same frameworks.
React has broken compatibility about once every two to three years. Next.js feels more like every other day.
These are not stable targets, which means your code is out of date next year.
This is the case at many teams in almost all companies. One sad reality is people want to keep their jobs and so they tend to inflate stacks and codebases so much so that they can "keep working on things" for a long long time.
Sorry to hear your situation but I found there's hardly any point in debating with your team on moving towards simplicity - just better to keep your head down and take that paycheck every 2 weeks.
My goal is to build a microstartup with a small team - and for that I am definitely going to choose the traditional JQuery/HTMX/Turbo setup with a server that renders templates. To hell with React.
I understand your perspective. It's similar to AWS services like CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS, and Lambdas—all designed for a microservice architecture that may not be necessary if scaling isn't a priority. The same applies to frameworks and libraries such as Next.js, and even React, Vue, or Angular, in my opinion. Most products and companies are not on the scale of Netflix, Spotify, or Facebook.
This leads me to question why people still use jQuery instead of native JavaScript. From my understanding, jQuery primarily serves as a polyfill. So why jQuery and not native Javascript?
> This leads me to question why people still use jQuery instead of native JavaScript.
Most cases because it is not worth the refactoring to remove jQuery and in a few cases when it is in new project is because the person coding doesn't know to code without it.
I don't mind adding that 200kb of bundle size, and I'm one of the peeps that feel Jquery is easier to read and less code to write. Just me opinion
I just saw someone put an expensive cloud API management product in between the Angular and API parts of a tiny monolith app.
Not even a shared API management service — dedicated to the app!
It’s insanity.
Good luck hiring people that will agree to that.
You are right that you are being efficient and reasonable, but also you are right that you sound like a dinosaur. This is the same for people who cling to C as "this is all I need", possibly producing beautiful efficient code with no VMs or slow interpreters, at the cost of lower cooperation with their colleagues.
The bottom line is your choice of tools is also a social thing. Rejecting the mainstream tooling can be appreciated by some, confuse others, and sadly developers with lower self confidence might even see it as a form of insult.
> You are right that you are being efficient and reasonable
Well, that’s all I needed to hear. What’s the point of not sounding old-fashioned when the new fashion is worse? Considering the social point, why not be more critical when the efficient and reasonable thing is derided by others as old-fashioned? Why not expect those people to update their world view?
Well you wouldn't do this in a company environment, this is for personal projects only.