Its not so much about re-inventing the wheel but more about understanding how the underlying system actually works.
So yes, go ahead and use a framework if that helps but when your UI Designer gives you something that doesnt neatly fit into a framework component you need to know enough to implement it yourself right?
Also - understanding how it actually works also helps when the JS community rallies around the next big thing 6 months down the road. I still find a lot of devs who cant do basic DOM manipulation without pulling in a jquery dependency.
I’m by no means a full time UI/front end dev - I do it when I have to.
Over the years as css has improved and my understanding has improved I find myself less inclined to use a framework because doing it yourself isnt difficult and you’re not stuck fixing bugs and issues in the underlying framework and fighting against it to do whatever weird thing your design requires.
I don't know if "difficult" is the word I would use. Is a mail merge in Microsoft Word "difficult"? I think probably not. But it would still take me longer to get a mail merge working in Office than it would for me to implement and test a topological sort or a breadth-first graph traversal. That's approximately how I feel about the level of difficulty involved in DIY-ing CSS and layout. I could get really good at it, I'm sure --- but why would I? Other people got these details right already, and did a better job of it than I would (it was, at the time, the most important thing they worked on, and a perfectly laid-out button or sidebar is always going to be very far down the list of most important thing I work on).
Honestly --- and this isn't fair but I am just being candid about my impressions --- the pushback I see to relying on frameworks reads to me as a combination of specialist front-end people feeling threatened and of dilettante developers being irritated that something might be invented somewhere other than here. But if you're using React at all, hasn't that ship sailed? Oh, wait, there are like 10 bespoke vdom JS frameworks now, so I guess it hasn't.
Buttons, sidebar, grid systems, and vdom libraries are commodities to me. I think they are and should be commodities to 80-90+% of all applications that get built anywhere. Build an online pharmacy or trading position and inventory tracker or continuous integration system or CDN console and I guarantee you that nobody who pays money for it will give a shit whether your buttons came from Foundation or you lovingly handcrafted them yourself.
In my experience consulting for basically every kind of company that ever makes software, most front-end development follows the former pattern, not the latter.
I agree preemptively that you aren't going to get a job on the front-end team at Square without an intimate knowledge of how modern HTML layout works. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve with posts like these; rather, it's "where do I start". Here's where to start.
So yes, go ahead and use a framework if that helps but when your UI Designer gives you something that doesnt neatly fit into a framework component you need to know enough to implement it yourself right?
Also - understanding how it actually works also helps when the JS community rallies around the next big thing 6 months down the road. I still find a lot of devs who cant do basic DOM manipulation without pulling in a jquery dependency.
I’m by no means a full time UI/front end dev - I do it when I have to. Over the years as css has improved and my understanding has improved I find myself less inclined to use a framework because doing it yourself isnt difficult and you’re not stuck fixing bugs and issues in the underlying framework and fighting against it to do whatever weird thing your design requires.