I had come from a Compilers/computer vision and distributed systems background, and just recently I decided I'd quit my job and bootstrap my own little SaaS business. My web development knowledge had basically been stuck in the era of PHP and XmlHttpRequest, so I was in for a huge surprise when I decided to dive into modern day web development. For 3 months I couldn't do anything useful; it's just straight up a lot of fumbling in the dark with lots of alternatives and opinions on how to do something. The most aggravating things I found were the proliferation of tutorials written by beginners, and libraries/frameworks with lots of new terminologies which are just rebranding of existing CS concepts. It's aggravating to me because I made a distinction between knowledge from sciences and knowledge of made up words that won't be relevant in a few years (e.g action reducers, action creators, state store, etc), but in the end I decided to just suck it up and internalize all these words so I can move on with my project. They were useful to someone's project, so surely I could humble myself and learn something from them.

This piece may seem like a satire on the current state of javascript's ecosystem, but as far as I'm concerned it's an accurate portrayal of the pains that one goes through when picking up front-end development from scratch. I can't reproduce my initial development environment from memory even if I wanted to (too many npm dependencies and command line incantations). I've resorted to freezing them in a git repo and forking from it when I want to start a new project. I hope in time I will figure out the bare basics for what I plan to do.

Reflecting on my learning experiences, I think perhaps I would have progressed faster if I had an opinionated mentor who could hide from me the diversity of the ecosystem, or a guide if you will, until I'm ready. Entering web front-end development is just like entering a bazaar with thousands of sellers calling out to you. You wanted to buy a simple woodwork table so you could get on with your home improvement project, but you left the place 8 hours later with a bunch of tools that would be used to build said table instead, and you're nowhere close to getting started on your actual project.

This maybe the beauty of the ecosystem, but getting into it wasn't a pleasant experience for me. Now that I've gone through that phase and can get started on the real work, I hope to spare others the pain with what I've learned.