This is a bit ranty but it resonates with what I’ve been noticing lately:
I’ve discovered how many others have felt similarly, overwhelmed by the choices we have as modern developers, always feeling like there’s something we should be doing better.
I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.
A really terrific piece from Garrett on the nature of the web:
Markup written almost 30 years ago runs exactly the same today as it did then without a single modification. At the same time, the platform has expanded to accommodate countless enhancements. And you don’t need a degree in computer science to understand or use the vast majority of it. Moreover, a well-constructed web page today would still be accessible on any browser ever made. Much of the newer functionality wouldn’t be supported, but the content would be accessible.
I share his concerns about the maintainability overhead introduced by new tools and frameworks:
I’d argue that for every hour these new technologies have saved me, they’ve cost me another in troubleshooting or upgrading the tool due to a web of invisible dependencies.
An excellent thorough analysis by Chris of the growing divide between front-end developers and …er, other front-end developers?
The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.
On one side, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are heavily revolved around JavaScript.
On the other, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are focused on other areas of the front end, like HTML, CSS, design, interaction, patterns, accessibility, etc.
Harry divides his web performance work into three categories:
I feel like a lot of businesses are still unsure where to even start when it comes to performance monitoring, and as such, they never do. By demystifying it and breaking it down into three clear categories, each with their own distinct time, place, and purpose, it immediately takes a lot of the effort away from them: rather than worrying what their strategy should be, they now simply need to ask ‘Do we have one?’
I had some problems with my bouzouki recently. Now, I know my bouzouki pretty well. I can navigate the strings and frets to make music. But this was a problem with the pickup under the saddle of the bouzouki’s bridge. So it wasn’t so much a musical problem as it was an electronics problem. I know nothing about electronics.
I found it incredibly frustrating. Not only did I have no idea how to fix the problem, but I also had no idea of the scope of the problem. Would it take five minutes or five days? Who knows? Not me.
My solution to a problem like this is to pay someone else to fix it. Even then I have to go through the process of having the problem explained to me by someone who understands and cares about electronics much more than me. I nod my head and try my best to look like I’m taking it all in, even though the truth is I have no particular desire to get to grips with the inner workings of pickups—I just want to make some music.
That feeling of frustration I get from having wiring issues with a musical instrument is the same feeling I get whenever something goes awry with my web server. I know just enough about servers to be dangerous. When something goes wrong, I feel very out of my depth, and again, I have no idea how long it will take the fix the problem: minutes, hours, days, or weeks.
I had a very bad day yesterday. I wanted to make a small change to the Clearleft website—one extra line of CSS. But the build process for the website is quite convoluted (and clever), automatically pulling in components from the site’s pattern library. Something somewhere in the pipeline went wrong—I still haven’t figured out what—and for a while there, the Clearleft website was down, thanks to me. (Luckily for me, Danielle saved the day …again. I’d be lost without her.)
I was feeling pretty down after that stressful day. I felt like an idiot for not knowing or understanding the wiring beneath the site.
But, on the other hand, considering I was only trying to edit a little bit of CSS, maybe the problem didn’t lie entirely with me.
There’s a principle underlying the architecture of the World Wide Web called The Rule of Least Power. It somewhat counterintuitively states that you should:
choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.
Perhaps, given the relative simplicity of the task I was trying to accomplish, the plumbing was over-engineered. That complexity wouldn’t matter if I could circumvent it, but without the build process, there’s no way to change the markup, CSS, or JavaScript for the site.
Still, most of the time, the build process isn’t a hindrance, it’s a help: concatenation, minification, linting and all that good stuff. Most of my frustration when something in the wiring goes wrong is because of how it makes me feel …just like with the pickup in my bouzouki, or the server powering my website. It’s not just that I find this stuff hard, but that I also feel like it’s stuff I’m supposed to know, rather than stuff I want to know.
On that note…
Last week, Paul wrote about getting to grips with JavaScript. On the very same day, Brad wrote about his struggle to learn React.
I think it’s really, really, really great when people share their frustrations and struggles like this. It’s very reassuring for anyone else out there who’s feeling similarly frustrated who’s worried that the problem lies with them. Also, this kind of confessional feedback is absolute gold dust for anyone looking to write explanations or documentation for JavaScript or React while battling the curse of knowledge. As Paul says:
The challenge now is to remember the pain and anguish I endured, and bare that in mind when helping others find their own path through the knotted weeds of JavaScript.
I can’t help but also wonder if we’re using tools to solve problems they weren’t meant to solve, like how to communicate with or manage a team.
Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).
I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.
PPK responds in his typically strident way to posts by Tim and Bastian. I don’t agree with everything here, but I very much agree with this:
It’s not about what works for you. It’s about what works for your users.
If a very complicated set-up with seven brand-new libraries and frameworks and a bunch of other tools satisfies you completely as a web developer but slows your sites down to a crawl for your users, you’re doing it wrong.
If serving your users’ needs requires you to use other tools than the ones you’d really like to use, you should set your personal preferences aside, even though it may make you feel less good. You have a job to do.
But it’s worth remembering this caveat too.
PPK writes of modern web development:
Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem.
I think he’s mostly correct, but I think there is some clarification required.
Web development tools fall into two broad categories:
It’s that second category that contain a tax on the end user. Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.