this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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I'm a backend developer and jesus fucking christ, 500KB? That's around the weight of code in an actual programming language for a mid-sized project, and front-end needs that much just for CSS? And CSS isn't even that verbose.
The whole Rust compiler is like 10MB and that's a huge codebase, including all the documentation and shit.
One more reason front-end work never clicked with me I guess
Yeah. That's one of the many reasons I wrote a damned rant about how fed up I am with front-end. It's insane to think web sites telling you about cars or coffee need 1MB+ to do so.
But it happens because front-end tooling makes it so fucking easy to write complicated, bloated code.
Most of my time and energy these days is deleting shit. I delete more than I write. But my proudest achievement was like 7 years ago when I was asked to add a Japanese font.
Took me 6 weeks. I deleted like 15% of the CSS in the process.
Why did it take so long, and why did it require deleting 15% of the code?
Because the dorks on the project used Sass for literally every line. So I had like 400+ instances of someone applying a font-family spread across 80 Sass files. Not a single.fucking.HTML.element received a style. Not. One.
There was no font-family declared anywhere that it could be inherited down.
So over three sprints I had to move the font-declarations into mixins, then onto raw elements, then actually delete the mixins on the classes. Eventually I got it down to like 18 instances of declaring the font family.
and then I wrote another 18 instances where I could apply the Japanese font.
Adding a Japanese font reduced the size of the CSS by 15%.
front-end work doesn't click with most front-end devs, either.