Don’t use Bootstrap

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

I am amazed how developers avoid to write CSS at all costs! They prefer to struggle with a CSS library than write simple CSS rules.

But the truth is that you cannot even use properly these libraries if you just don't want to understand CSS.

In the end, the result will still look horrible with an extra dependency on the list

here it is

"We use top of the art, endgame, final boss, super technology"

What they actually use: Java 1.8, jQuery, JSP and an old version of bootstrap

Why is this still a thing?

Why do I find it hard to use UI libraries such as MUI, bootstrap or even tailwind?

In most businesses, self-proclaimed full-stack teams are usually more back-end leaning as historically the need to use JS more extensively has imposed itself on back-end-only teams (that used to handle some basic HTML/CSS/JS/bootstrap on the side). This is something I witnessed over the years in 4 projects.

Back-end developers looking for a good JS framework will inevitably land on the triad of Vue, React and Angular, elegant solutions for SPA's. These frameworks are way more permissive than traditional back-end MVC frameworks (Dotnet core, Symfony, Spring boot), meaning it is easy to get something that looks like it's working even when it is not "right" (=idiomatic, unit-testable, maintainable).

They then use components as if they were simple HTML elements injecting the initial state via attributes (props), skip event handling and immediately add state store libraries (Vuex, Redux). They aren't aware that updating a single prop in an object with 1000 keys passed as prop will be nefarious for rendering performance. They also read something about SSR and immediately add Next.js or Nuxt.js, a custom Node express.js proxy and npm install a ton of "ecosystem" modules like webpack loaders that will become abandonware in a year.

After 6 months you get: 3 basic forms with a few fields, regressions, 2MB of JS, missing basic a11y, unmaintainable translation files & business logic scattered across components, an "outdated" stack that logs 20 deprecation notices on npm install, a component library that is hard to unit-test, validate and update, completely vendor-& version locked in and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.

I empathize with the back-end devs: JS frameworks should not brand themselves as "simple" or "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They should not treat their audience as if it were fully aware and able to use concepts of composition, immutability, and custom "hooks" paired with the quirks of JS, and especially WHEN they are a good fit.

ahhh fuck web development.

i heard somewhere that "money can't buy everything , but i would look pretty awesome crying about it in my Mercedes" . i am going to apply something similar in my web dev learning path

It’s a huge nightmare to develop a React front-end when:
- you have to adapt Bootstrap 3/jQuery based components to React
- the “back-end” is a sparse collection of micro services with cryptic URLs and finding the correct name means searching on a laggy WSO2 API manager
- the documentation of said micro services can be outdated and that means wasting a lot of time trying requests on cURL rather than in doing actual development and continuously breaking your concentration
- sometimes the micro services just become unavailable altogether
- the back-end shuts down at
6PM everyday, usually when after I finally achieved a flow and I’m doing meaningful progress

I have some down time at work & nobody on my team has any extra work to go around, so I thought I'd use the down time to learn a new skill. I am a front end developer who mostly works with HTML, CSS, PHP & a small amount of JavaScript. I do a lot of work with flex box, and frameworks like bootstrap. I've been considering learning angular or working on my php as that's my weak area. Any suggestions on cool things to learn and/or where to learn them?

I started to build a blog with Bootstrap, to practice, my doubt is if I should write it in English or Spanish (I'm from Argentina)

i just want to say i dont like material ui because customizing it is so painful . bootstrap is so much breeze to work with.