Dealing with this now at work. Got a dev whose time in the industry should make him a senior dev but he gives off massive junior vibes.

• The need to change everything he touches

• Wanting to write clever code over straightforward code

• Everything “needs” a refactor

• Just deprecates things when he doesn’t want to learn them and writes a new implementation without updating old code

• Thinks he knows best while not understanding huge swaths of the codebase

• Everything he can’t understand in <5 min is stupid and wrong

If he was less competent (when kept in a box and closely monitored) I’d be pushing even harder to get rid of him.

I’ve got nothing against SSR, never have, but CSR or even better SSR+CSR side steps a metric shit ton of issues. I’ve written untold lines of code to render something out in PHP then needed to add jQuery logic to the frontend for UX/UI reasons and then I’ve had to duplicate UI generation in JS/jQuery to match what PHP spits back (think: add a new row to an interface after an Ajax call finishes). It’s hell, you have to keep the two in sync and it’s a bug minefield.

Compare that to CSR where all the DOM is generated though a single codepath. Now take CSR to the next level with SSR+CSR and you’ve got a winning combo. Fast initial render and SEO gains (if you even need that) and only 1 DOM generation pathway.

People want to sound all smug “Oh, back to SSR are we?”, “Uh yeah, we had to CSR first to get to SSR+CSR which is VASTLY superior to SSR alone”.

Tech is circular in that way. See also mainframes, to personal computers, to cloud or any other similar cycle.

I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

Which sounds great in theory but then you get to find where your prod DB and testing DB differ and you have to keep chasing that. Unless you are using something like SQLite which has both (disk and in-memory) as an option.

I worked at a place that used a different in-memory DB (H2, IIRC) in place of our MySQL DB for testing. It ended up being hell to maintain and had to have hacks for how H2 and MySQL differ (tests would work in H2 but fail if run against MySQL or vice versa).