A lot of the ease and benefits depends on your style.
If your code pattern was to have variables holding your state and rendering html based on that, you will have an easy transition to React ( and likely didn't suffer horrible pains with jQuery).
If your code style is to update the DOM to reflect your state, and when you need to know something about state, you read the DOM, then React will feel odd and complex (and you likely have had jQuery projects work great until they hit a level of complexity and then they suddenly become brittle and hard to change)
This is why I prefer React - the best practices if React are just the best practices for functions. (That and I don't like the pseudo js syntax of Vue with the mysterious scoping)
> In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire
This seems an excessively negative take on it.
How do we learn new words? Sure, we COULD look up the definitions, but (1) who bothers, and (2) we have plenty of evidence that definitions are so vague as to be useless. (I recall arguing with my high school english teacher about "moot", which we had as aa vocab word with a definition that didn't match my colloquial understanding).
So as adults, as teens, tweens, and before, most of our language is learned from contextual usage. Which is a terrible way to maintain accuracy. When I get stumped with newer terminology, my friends that USE the new words are often at a loss to explain them (one spent 30 mins trying to explain "kappa") because they don't know a formal definition, they know it when they see it.
We can be smug and superior about the "less literate" trying to be impressive, but honestly, that applies to all of us, we are just mocking those that get caught.
Yes, I concede it's a bit of a bugbear - apologies for the negativity.
The idea that not spending the requisite minute or so to look up meaning and usage of a new word is acceptable behaviour of adults seems depressingly defeatist. We don't consider this an acceptable attitude during a child's dozen or more years of formal education, and realistically most adults have easy & rapid access to authoritative sources.
That our languages should then be (re)defined by these torpid users -- well that's just a horrible deal.
How many things have been aberrant and denounced, only to become the regrettable norm in the last few years?
When I was a child, the US wouldn't open admit to torture. It didn't have publicly known programs to ship prisoners to other jurisdictions so the U.S. rules of conduct could be bypassed. It didn't have a (publicly known) prison filled with non-U.S. people that were denied a civil trial. It didn't have a president that actively preached for or against public companies outside of criminal matters. When I was a child, a president openly violating ethics concerns WAS a matter of that president getting removed - with such certainty they'd step down to avoid the inevitable result.
I'm totally willing to believe that an aberrant behavior doesn't have to become the norm, but I won't believe that should be expected. I've been told all my life to expect that dramatic reactions and concerns are overstated and not the case, that we should all be calm and expect things to work out well, but if I look at the actual events of my life, I see the opposite lessons being taught: Unless we react strongly, clearly, and persistently, progress will not happen and things will slide for the worse.
It's not the lesson I want to learn, it's not a lesson I am comfortable with, but it does appear to be what I've seen in the last few decades.
> I'd say there is more transparency around unethical behavior by elected officials
And that's what worries me - note in my post above I was careful to talk about "public". Before there was a veil of deniability, the idea that at least a pretense of innocence had to be maintained.
Now it feels like there is little care to hide it. Sure, many of us are outraged, but that outrage has done nothing to translate into stopping the actions.
Your perspective really resonates with me, and it reminds me of the old quote "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue". When people lie to cover up their misdeeds, it at least promotes the collective acknowledgement that we have certain values.
Go back a little more and you've got US concentration camps where they put in anyone Japanese or looking vaguely asian.
Go back a little more and you've got Mexicans at the border branded as dirty, forced to take bleach showers and have their clothes fumigated using Zyklon-B, inspiring the Germans to use it to mass-execute Jews. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots ).
Go back a little more and you've got slavery and states trying to segregate from the US to maintain the system.
Go back a little more and you've got immigrants genociding the native population using biological agents, bullets, and mass rape to conquer the land as their own.
The US has NEVER had the moral high ground; their best claim to fame is helping to liberate Europe from the Nazis, but other than that they've absolutely shit.
I struggle to understand the target audience for this. I'm currently crushed by lack of productivity, and overthinking is definitely a large part of the problem. But I can't just "not think" - I'm painfully aware of how behind I am, how much I don't understand in my current workload, and any time taken to understand it quickly overwhelms me with frustration and fear. This means I don't get any progress made, I understand things no better, the fear is heightened, and it all gets worse.
Logically I'm aware that I'm my own enemy here - that my natural evasion of dealing with the problem is amplifying the problem. But that logic doesn't translate to action. Like an adult that tells a child to not let someone teasing them bother them, the child doesn't really have the option to NOT feel the humiliation of the teasing. When I go to try and tackle the problem, within minutes my brain shuts down except for that active amygdala, pumping fear hormones into my system and blocking any actual learning.
So avoiding the problem doesn't help. Attempting to tackle the problem doesn't help.
The problem is real, but who are the people that just go "oh, I just need to relax!" and that WORKS?!
Yep, exactly right. I suspect that authors of posts like the OP are people who might have small blips on the productivity/overthinking radar but otherwise are generally productive. They run into a small problem, "don't think about it," and get back to work, and everything is again fine. (Of course, everything would have been fine no matter what they did.) They then write blog posts about how they can just stop thinking about issues. Then people with more serious difficulties read those posts, try them, and go, "huh?"
I had these sorts of issues, too. The true answer to overthinking isn't to stop overthinking, of course. The true answer is to realize that overthinking is a symptom but not the cause, and so you need to find the root cause and treat that instead.
Just imagine you have some meter in your mind somewhere, not sort of unlike an HP bar, that measures how you're doing mentally. There are some actions you can do to replenish this bar, and some that will deplete it. If you find yourself overthinking constantly, it's possible that that bar is quite depleted. However, remember, it's a symptom of a low bar. Telling it to go away won't actually go away. You can also do a self-inventory to see how you're doing on replenishing it by checking to see how much you overthought on a given day.
Everyone has their own things that replenish and deplete from this reservoir. I personally like hanging out with friends and exercising, but your mileage may vary. Other people like meditating, or cooking, or walking. It's pretty crucial to remember, though, that your current source of anxiety is probably just a red herring.
> It's pretty crucial to remember, though, that your current source of anxiety is probably just a red herring.
Everytime I have anxiety it's my brain focusing on one thing to avoid confronting the real problem. When I finally find the thing I am avoiding it's usually not that bad of an experience to deal with it directly. Some examples are "I should call person X to deliver news Y." Or "I need to make a big decision soon."
When I was faced with this issue I found that spending about 30 minutes at the start of the day planning, and then another 15 minutes or so at the end of the day conducting a retrospective, really helped. Start by creating a list of tasks to be completed, and then prioritise them. It helps to be very specific with your tasks. Don't have a task be "work on assignment 3", have the task be, "Find 6 articles to support section 1 of assignment 3". Once you've got your prioritised list, work on them starting from the top and mark them off when you're complete. Sometimes you will have emergency tasks come in that take priority, and that's ok. Log them in your task list and work on them like any other task. It's ok to not complete the tasks you planned for the day. In your retrospective, critically examine the tasks you completed, and determine (and log) why you either did or did not complete everything you'd planned. Next morning in your planning session, take yesterday's list, re-prioritise with any new tasks that have come up, and work through the process. If your tasklist keeps growing and growing forever, then it's just fundamentally clear that you have too much work to do in the time allocated and you need to either bring somebody else in to help or start making sacrifices, either with the tasks you take on or the quality/effort of your work.
Dont avoid the problem, take a thin slice at a time, don’t think how much behind you are because that is bound to stress you and spiral you down into an unproductive loop. Just do something.
Whatever you don’t know put it down on a list, get it out of your head
I second this sentiment. Breaking a problem down into a smaller set of problems tends to help for me. It's much easier to start and be consistent with a small set of changes and grow them over time.
If I can add onto "just do something", sometimes a brute forced/hacky solution is better than nothing. I know that I will delay something if I don't think I can do the "perfect" version of it (either in diet or exercise); however, I have found that starting a behavior in a small way and being consistent is infinitely better than waiting to have the circumstances be perfect.
When I am having difficulty starting a task I start with making a list of everything that needs to get done to solve the problem. It always make it more manageable.
Fake it 'til you make it applies. When you're in the habit of stressing/overthinking, it's temporarily built into the way you process things. To overcome it, you have to practice controlling your mind. Sometimes starting with, "What is the worst way I could do this?" is helpful, because there's nowhere to go but up, and sometimes you trick your brain into producing solutions that seemed too ridiculous to consider - my own experience, anyway.
A useful thing I've learned: "just relax" doesn't work, but if you take the same idea and apply it to the more specific things which are causing you to not be relaxed, you can make some headway.
In other words, if you take note of what you're having concerned thoughts about, you can pause and ask, "is it that important right now? Is it okay to leave this alone until tomorrow?" And if you can honestly say it's alright, you'll begin to relax.
What works for me, is to ask myself what is the next step and then try and focus exclusively on that. When my mind wanders three steps ahead, I mentally kick myself in the butt and remind myself to focus on the next thing only.
It's a discipline like a lot of things, and it gets easier the more you do it.
I have been on the situation that I was overstressed, but thought I was unproductive because everything was boring, and I had to push myself more until I got into the interesting stuff. Just somebody telling me I had to relax was already enough to help.
But I don't think in any circumstance I could simply read this in a web article and get the point. The person that told me to relax was a psychologist, that had a list of symptoms to base his advice on.
I understand your perspective. I am yet to read the OPs submission I did want to give some insight that helps me a lot with overthinking and just doing.
I use GTD and Trello to manage my reoccurring tasks. I eliminate a lot of overthinking at the wrong time by planning and scheduling at the appropriate time.
After several months I have built a system that I have learned to trust. It has taken a long time to get here, but it makes a real difference for me.
You need to admit that you can't do everything on the list and say No to some. Declare plan bankruptcy so you aren't allowed down by work you aren't going to do anyway.
> Consistent style is more important than each block of code being perfectly pretty
"Pretty", yes, but we're literally talking about using language to communicate. Consistency taken to extremes is harmful to communication.
I don't understand the worship that people have for consistency. STUPID inconsistencies are bad, yes, and yes, there are certainly arguments that about subjective matters that are a waste of time. But distilling everything down to the lowest common denominator of grunt-talking is very consistent and terrible communication. (Does that feel like a strawman? I'd love for it to be! Once people stop talking about consistency uber-alles we'll be discussing the things that I consider important.) Right now, the most common reaction is to dismiss any idea of communication through language as irrelevant, subjective, and a waste of time."
I’d agree that 100% consistency is harmful to communication, but the primary communication happening in programming is with a computer. Even when it comes to other developers looking at your code, their internal process is “let me simulate what the computer understands”.
Unless you are enforcing weird autoformat choices, everything should look pretty enough.
My heuristic is that if anyone else will ever read the code, it should be statically typed (or be written in a language like shell where the language is essentially limited to one type).
Most people disagree, but then they end up writing giant python monoliths with layers of implementation inheritance, dependency injection and functional programming paradigms.
In the end, they try to port it to pretty much any other language, but at that point it’s too late.
I forget where I saw it, but I appreciate a comment that says: When faced with extreme inequality, you can redistribute wealth through taxation or you can redistribute poverty through revolution.
They'll find out how much of the rhetoric the company feeds them is true or not. They'll know for themselves when they deemed it important to draw a line.
As a matter of calculation, the timing isn't ideal. None of them seem to be saying it is a matter of calculated timing to leverage their market value though.
This is my key question, and I ask with minimal assumption that either one is better.
What are the criteria we are even using to judge? Clarity that there is state is one. Elsewhere there are arguments about ABI that I fail to have practical knowledge of. There was some discussion of the data structure describing your program that completely lost me. Explicitness is lost when discussing closures.
What makes one better than the other in ways that arent entirely subjective?
> Our company moved to it and its been horrible with any third party application or marketing pixel.
Isn't that part of the point though? 3rd party marketing and tracking pixels are NOT things that improve the experience or performance for the visitor.
Yes, this is true. But when our company (ecommerce) relies heavily on marketing data it becomes an issue. Third party applications that provide UX and UI are impacted as well.
The main issue here is executives believed the hype that an AMP website would result in higher revenue and that is not the case. The money spent on making our website AMP'd could have been spent fixing the current system.
A lot of the ease and benefits depends on your style.
If your code pattern was to have variables holding your state and rendering html based on that, you will have an easy transition to React ( and likely didn't suffer horrible pains with jQuery).
If your code style is to update the DOM to reflect your state, and when you need to know something about state, you read the DOM, then React will feel odd and complex (and you likely have had jQuery projects work great until they hit a level of complexity and then they suddenly become brittle and hard to change)
This is why I prefer React - the best practices if React are just the best practices for functions. (That and I don't like the pseudo js syntax of Vue with the mysterious scoping)