Abstractions, complexities, and off-ramps in front end development

This talk from Jack Franklin is one of the best talks on front end web development that I’ve ever seen.

The talk is very reminiscent of my own talk on the Lean Web.

In it, Jack discusses the challenges that all of the abstractions we’ve added to our code create—both for us and the people who use what we make.

You should watch the whole thing, but some highlights for me…

• The beauty and nostalgia of just opening a text editor and writing code.
• That we have prioritized developer experience over UX (which creates distance between us and our users).
• How tooling hides the cost of our code, and asks the users to pay for it instead of us.
• For all of the hand-wringing about websites vs. apps, “most of us are still making documents” for the web.
• Lasagna Code (like spaghetti code, but with layers).
• Because tools make it easy to add more code, we keep doing it without much consideration.
• Every dependency is a potential single point of failure. The more we have, the more places we have for code to break.
  

The second half of the talk is focused on what we can actually do about it.

Spoiler: the answer is to use web-native technology when you can, and be more thoughtful about what dependencies you choose when you can’t.

Hell yes!