People are probably awful... They hear a new word, don't know what it means, and then copy it all over the place until it doesn't mean anything anymore.

That's the problem. Someone made a nice set of "programming koans" that were (koans + exercises). But, that has spawned new "programming koans" that are just a set of (exercises) with no koans. Koans are supposed to involve practice [0]. But, does practicing a set of (koans + exercises - koans) have koan-nature? ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan

Personally, I just feel stupid every time I try to do anything in Angular... None of it works the way I expect it to, and I can't get the point where I feel like I actually understand what's going on.

React's "rerender the world" approach is _much_ easier to reason about.

Not the OP but after trying out React, it feels like the way I've always wanted to structure components in JavaScript. I did a once-over of the Angular tutorials and the kitchen-sink approach doesn't really do it for me. React is about your Views, and the logic contained therein, and that's it.

Without virtual DOM considerations on the line, after about a week of it it's very intuitive. The whole component lifecycle thing seems overkill until you realize you have full control over the components. Things are a little trickier if you have to use it as I do (with jQuery), but even then, your biggest hurdle is understanding props vs state -- once that's cleared up, the sky's the limit.

Im Bootstrapping a start up this summer and it seems like in the long term it will be better to stay with just a JS code base and not having to worry about the Typescript Angular 2 transition.

This is my first serious app so I'm new to a lot of the backend architecture options. I have no experience with Devops so I was thinking about creating the first version with a parse backend then moving to a docker container on AWS when it would start saving me some money.

I guess the question I would put out to Hacker News is how would you suggest I estimate the technical debt this would shoulder me with later on and would it be better to integrate with AWS now? I have a small amount of funding, about 2500$ and 100% free time before I go back to college this September.

I just took a ReactJs workshop last week and was really impressed with how easy it was to use. The guy that was giving the workshop (Henrik Joretag) used it with AmersandJS and Webpack. He was also using a lot of the new ES6 syntax which was really cool.

The reason he was really into React was how it just deals with the views so you have the flexibility to combine it with other libraries to get what you need and you're not locked into a full framework like AngularJS.

I've been getting into Angular recently, but this really opened my eyes to how powerful React is.