As someone who has written both React and Svelte for many years I must interject. React is itself just a library. No, you don’t need any specific “wrappers” for it. Let’s not mislead the readers here.
Just a personal anecdotal datapoint, but relevant and possibly interesting nonetheless.
I work full time and even by modern standards I'm what most would call a heavily-involved father. I have an 18month old.
After my daughter was born, due to the amount of stress and lack of sleep I very soon realised I had to return to doing regular resistance training, clean diet and cut other things like drinking alcohol. In order to keep my energy levels sufficiently high and mental health in check.
I now feel much better than I did in years. Albeit still heavily sleep deprived most days. Recent bloodwork shows that my T levels nearly doubled (compared to before becoming a dad) from average to slightly off-the-charts high.
Take it as you will, but for me fatherhood forced me to reevaluate how I spend my time very carefully, forcing me to take care of myself more so I can take care of my family sufficiently too.
I get that. I quit smoking when my first child was born.
I think my devil-may-care attitude toward longevity changed when I realized I had a long-term investment cradled in my arms. And I wanted to live long enough to see her leave the nest at least.
If you need external input to improve yourself then I'm wondering if you are ready to be a father. I might sound rude, but it is not my intention. I don't know how else to put it. It is still better than people who never learn this either way.
When we only have ourselves to care about, I think it is easier to be irresponsible about our health. It is only ourselves who suffer the consequences. That kind of "solitary-ism" or ego can swing either way: you care so much for yourself that you focus on your health, or instead focus on enjoying those things life has to offer like food and wine (often at the expense of health).
Unlike my and many other's parents, I waited until I was older, more mature and planned beginning a family. Nonetheless, I suspect none of us were truly prepared for what that would mean—especially in the life-changing ways it manifest in.
So if some of us were not focused on our own health before going into fatherhood, I am not surprised. No doubt there are others that had checked off that box but started a family with much slimmer finances than I thought necessary to begin fatherhood.
In the end I suspect it is easy to Monday-morning quarterback my introduction to fatherhood and determine where I could have done better. At the same time, and I am considering my own upbringing, I could have done much, much worse. And yet most of us make it to adulthood with more or less healthy minds and bodies.
What this person could've take away here was that:
- Contrary to what the article states, parenthood in males can sometimes even boost testosterone through external factors.
- Or that resitance training and diet is a great way to deal with daily stress.
What instead they took away was that improving oneself for family somehow makes you unfit to be a parent.
A rather dark interpretation. Sincerely hope they are OK and well.
In full-time employment this is sad but true. There is a way out of this toxic loop however.
As a consultant/contractor I always evangelise simplification and modelling problems from first principles. I jump between companies every 6-12 months, cleaning up after years of complexity-driven development, or outright designing robust systems that anybody (not just the author) can maintain and extend.
This level of honesty helps you build a reputation. I am never short for work. I also bill more than I could ever as a full-time engineer based in Europe.
As a rule of thumb, "magic" is a code smell. Libraries should be preferred over frameworks whenever possible.
A toolbelt of small utility-like composables are often easier to maintain and reason about. This results in added explicitness (i.e. less magic, fewer surprises).
Personal experience shows that the immediate efficiency gains of a framework often get diminished in the face of all the hacks people introduce later, just to work around the remaining 10% of cases that the framework did not anticipate or traded-off against.
Please note this is a comment based on personal experience and professional preference.
I don‘t like dismissing technologies on the basis of being „magic“, since the magic could often just as well be called abstraction, and the line between them is often personal preference.
The abstracted-away logic in a Laravel application can either be called magic or abstraction, but so can the optimizations of a database query planner.
I think often you still need to know the underlying mechanism, but it is still useful to get the innards out of the way.
It's useful to get "glue" code out of the way while building, but to the point in the article it all becomes very difficult to debug and maintain once there are problems in the that layer.
Spring Boot and other similar frameworks come to mind; by forcing huge amounts of indirection you lose a lot of visibility of your call stack because the convenient "glue" code is now orchestrating everything at runtime, but that code isn't yours, and it isn't easily inspected or fixed.
In case "framework" is understood as something that calls my code and that forces me to write my code in a certain way, I totally agree.
And I think twice before I use a framework. Frameworks enforce a certain way of programming which you can never be sure to match the problems you will have to solve in the future. Libraries don't do this - at least not to the extent of a framework. Libraries are composable building blocks.
Nevertheless, there may be applications where frameworks are beneficial (e.g. GNU Radio).
I had to look up BOCTAOE (But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions)
"Good magic decomposes into sane primitives" highlights an essential distinction: not all magic is bad (but it's not always clear at first which kind of magic is in play).
