There’s always this guy, trying to diminish whatever good you’re trying to do for your team without having contributed anything himself. There’s always this guy, claiming to be liberal and open to other opinions, as long as they don’t conflict with his own interests. There’s always this guy, lecturing people about their wrongdoings but can’t stand criticism himself. There’s always this guy, expecting things of others which he himself never lives up to. There’s always this guy, blaming everyone else but himself. There’s always this guy, dragging others down to cut a better figure. There’s always this guy, envying everything good that doesn’t happen to himself.

Just don’t be that guy.

I recently reviewed the performance of one of our clients’ websites. During its lifespan, a myriad of developers had contributed their code without any form version control.

One thing that struck me instantly was the heavy use of JavaScript and CSS frameworks. I counted a total of three framework integrations accompanied by several other scripts that seemed to be solely fulfilling just one purpose each. Even for an “organically grown” codebase this seemed a bit too much.

When it comes to frameworks of any kind, I think it’s worth considering that it comes at a cost. Not to sound old and grumpy but I still see especially young developers choosing their own convenience over the convenience of their users and disregarding the fact, that throwing another 100 KB JavaScript into the mix might actually do more harm than good in terms of performance (and therefore: user experience).

Don’t get me wrong: frameworks are great and they can make your life easier if they are considered well. Let’s say you’re building a web application and are planning to use all kinds of enhancements to make user input easier, i.e. date pickers, spinners, range sliders and so on, then sure, it might be worth considering a framework that can provide this kind of functionality for you.

But if you only want to attach an event listener to an element, then why bother including a JavaScript library to do what you could have done with just a few lines of JavaScript yourself?