Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

I inherited a nextjs project from an unknown guy and am fangirling the codebase

But the deeper I familiarise myself with it, the more the cracks begin to appear:

1) The dude Is incapable of grasping the basics of DRY concept. He actually setup a ton of stuff I may have done poorly if I'd started working straight out of the docs, so I feel like I owe him a shower of praise. I guess being new to nextjs makes it look more impressive than it actually is. He was paid off, yet getting the credit seems unearned to me. I'm just afraid reaching out to him might turn around to bite me in the ass
***

I had the above in my drafts, contemplating sending him a token to show some appreciation for unknowingly showing me the ropes. I was going to find him on LinkedIn using his commit names. But after doing everything I've done, undergoing the anxiety and severe pressure I faced at the hands of the project owners, I'm not sharing a farthing with anybody

Yes, I may not have known about zustand and persist middleware. Yes, he did all the ui. Yes, he created the base components and fancy wrappers around form and button html elements. For those, I'm grateful

But the amount of refactoring I had to do to, for an opportunity to implement my own target features, I'd say I can lay as much claim to the project as he does.

Side note #1: I have some newfound respect for front end devs. We used to discriminate against them for doing just css but that was only relevant in the jquery days. Now, they have to use cryptic css frameworks (sass, less, tailwind), they have to learn esoteric syntax of some js framework and write controllers/components as the case may be. They have to (the worst part), bind this data to an API, which would never make sense to me coming from a php ssr-natural world

Back rewarding the guy, some of the challenges I came back from were:

1) Next server outages: I still don't know the workaround this. The app terminates, browser giving an error about using up memory. I have to wait for about 10 minutes before I can access the app again

2) spring Webflux authentication not hydrating: I was unexpectedly asked to work on the back end too, where I got tortured with this horrifying condition. The most poorly documented framework for the Web has no upto date guide on how to implement jwt security measures. I opened a question on stackoverflow. A day later, both my question and the helpful answer got downvoted

3) Zustand not retrieving any data from localstorage once page reloads, until I miraculously stumbled on a hack: there's a config callback for reading state after rehydration or thereabout. So I interact with the state there. That's the only way content clearly in localstorage can get transmuted into dynamic format accessible by the code

4) Mongo database suddenly disconnecting: for no apparent reason, this bailed. Accessible on compass. This was even when I realised it was responsible for front end requests not going through. Eventually created a new database and requests surprisingly began connecting again. Thankfully, my laravel background taught me about seeders so I had them on standby from the onset. Wasn't difficult to just port to a fresh database after confirming the first one was inaccessible to the app

After this painful odyssey and the time constraints, threats of moving forward with someone else, I deserve every dime they deem me worthy of and more

Disclaimer: This joke will be lost in translation but I can't help but make it

In my country, you can use the phrase "it's not beans" to describe something difficult eg "that ielts exam no be beans". Given my recent woes with spring boot, I can also say "spring webflux no be beans". But it's funny to me because the framework calls objects bound to the container "beans" so it's a nerdy, don't leave me joke

I hate the fucking Spring WebFlux and the goddamn Project Reactor on which it depends!
Even debugging a simple CRUD microservice with simple business logic is such a pain in the ass, exception handling has a lot of "magic" implicit stuff which makes me waste hours in fucking trial & error and I have to use very little breakpoints because if a request is paused for more than few seconds it gets terminated.
I love functional programming but why shove it in fucking Java making me waste 90% of my time in trying to guessing what the fucking framework is doing, why not just use Scala which runs in the JVM? We don't even need compatibility with legacy code since it's a greenfield project!

And before you ask yes, I read a fucking book about Project Reactor and Java reactive programming and a lot of docs on Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Web Flux.

Spring WebFlux? pros, cons?

Was surprised to stumble on somewhere I wrote,

"Doesn't matter whether they love it or not. It must be finished, either way "

I felt like crying. It's not dated so I don't know when, but it should be early 2023. I'd been working on suphle for two years with neither assistance nor guarantee that it'll turn out great. I noted that after running out of juice to energise myself till the finish line. I strived to finish it and launched to the php community in September /October 2023, with it reaching box office bomb acclaim

BUT I did keep to my pact with my younger self. The uncertainty was insufficient to hold me back. I know suphle was not trash because even as recent as last week, I saw a method "onErrorResume", in spring webflux that provides developers with an API for gracefully handling runtime errors. Suphle is ahead of its time cuz I had this built-in without ever seeing it elsewhere

I saw parallels with nestjs too when I used it last year. They just never gave it the opportunity to see light of day. The story would have been more complete but finishing it is enough for me. At least I tried. It wasn't abandoned and we aren't now talking about pending features and how I'd never make out time to work on them or dream of how great it would have been if the world got its hands on it. Or how I'm holding myself back. We know all those details now

Write a book on advanced spring webflux / project reactor usage. Plenty of beginner guides and tutorials, but there's very little out there that's actually useful from a real world perspective.

It's me or the "Reactive Functional" Spring WebFlux is a stupid fad? It's hard to train new developers on it, a PITA to debug and there isn't any study which proves which it brings better performance compared to the classic Spring MVC.