I am getting very tired of "why are people surprised"
I am certainly surprised when FB does something evil because their CEO continually preaches the importance of privacy, so shame on me I guess for taking him at his word
It amazes me how level-headed the author really is about all this. I feel like I'm a lot more upset about this than the author. And, just like him, I don't care that they "forked" the project. I'm upset of how cunning of Microsoft this whole thing feels.
I will try my best to be nice about this. But what the HECK are you talking about? Yes, of course there is. There will always be.
Electron(or whatever web-based nonsense somebody comes up with six months from now):we've optimized your insane garbage collectors. We've optimized your GPU insane modules. We've optimized data structures to get a 10X performance increase. We've cut down memory usage by half, which still rounds down to AT LEAST 100MB in most cases. Look at me now...
Desktop/Native:Good for you! But did you know my code runs on bare metal? The only thing stopping it is cache misses and dirty TLB entries. Sometimes I can use registers, but there's just a few of them. And, well, stupid RAM sometimes takes over 100 nanoseconds.
Web:What in the world is cache? TLB? Are you on something right now? What is a nanosecond?????
Web cannot perceive what a nanosecond is
Native:There, there. You'll figure it out one day.
I don't want to come off as snarky, but this feels like a dumb question. And yes, I know, from a "business" perspective writing the code "once" and have run everywhere makes more sense. But let's be real, one of the main reasons a lot of these tech companies like Discord/Slack is jumping on the Electron wagon is money. It's cheaper to have one team of developers, than 3 for each platform. But even that argument feels a little weird to me when stuff like Qt that is 100X more mature than Electron will ever be exists. And before anyone asks, as long as you open source your app, Qt is completely free.
I do think that in SOME cases an Electron app MIGHT make sense. But cluttering native platforms with all this bloat is like riding a horse to work on your 40 mile commute instead of your Honda. Even that's a horrible analogy because your Honda is terrible for the Earth. But hopefully you get my point.
This lack of concern for computational resources by us programmers is utterly discouraging. As has been mentioned before in this thread, people that do ACTUAL work on computers will not take the bloated nonsense. Go ask the struggling artist if they prefer to use Krita or the new "modern" app that takes 600MB of RAM and the entire system gets bugged down to the point where they can't do research on their browser while drawing because Windows10/macOS plus the "modern" app takes 90% of their RAM because they have a 4GB/6GB computer.
Well shit, I guess I need a 1500 dollar computer to just draw a few sketches. I already have crippling debt, what's some more debt under my belt gonna do?
Recent College grad here(January, 2020): I thought I was crazy being one of the few people that tried to stay the hell away from Amazon. I've heard so many mixed reviews about their working culture. I spent six years in college and absolutely don't want a company like Amazon to make me hate myself as a programmer. Programming is very dear to my heart and I only want to use it for good.
Congrats on graduating! I started my career during the 2008 recession. I hope things are going more smoothly for you.
My biggest advice and what I wish I'd known back then or heeded better:
Networking will be your savior during this. Find open source projects that you're passionate about and work toward contributing to them. Just help out where and when you can, even if it's just helping to moderate chats, webinars, etc. Depending on the size and organization of the project you'll meet and work with other contributors that use that project in their day-to-day lives at their companies in production. These will be your feet in the door at companies that actually use your passion-project plus you'll learn an incredible amount through osmosis.
A lot of open source projects bring in interns, GSOC, etc type of stuff. They won't expect you to hit home runs. Don't be upset if you're put on documentation duty or editing in the beginning. We all need those skills and some of us engineers get so in the weeds that we forget how to do those more soft skills.
You probably already know all this, I have no idea what compsci courses are like, I didn't have the opportunity to partake in college.
Thanks for making this! It's really nice because you only have to go to one website as opposed to many. I think some folks might prefer this easy approach, but I personally prefer a more "offline" approach like JobFunnel-->https://github.com/PaulMcInnis/JobFunnel
