For and against
Yesterday, good internet friend Baldur Bjarnason shared a series of shorts he made on why he doesn’t use generative AI, and it got me thinking about how much of my career has spent being against things.
Early in my career, I was for web performance and accessibility and building cool things.
But as JavaScript frameworks became increasingly ubiquitous, we saw the things I was for start to degrade rapidly. Sites got slower and harder to use.
The web took on a boring sameness.
I spent increasing amounts of my time and energy being against JS-heavy tooling like React and abstracting away writing code to NPM modules.
More recently, I’ve been against AI. Like the JS libraries of yore, it’s making the web shittier… for the same reasons as JS frameworks, and many new reasons, too.
Friends, I’m so fucking sick of being against things.
I want to be for things again, but the current state of the web and the tech industry more broadly has made that relatively impossible for me when it comes to web developer topics.
That’s not to say there’s not still good things happening to the web. CSS is having a renaissance!
But the joy is gone for me.
To quote one of my favorite book series, Monk & Robot…
They knew how. It wasn’t that they didn’t care or didn’t want to. They wanted. They still loved… what it had been.
But as they tried to connect to what had once been so captivating, they felt nothing but yawning absence. A void where they’d once been filled.
That’s essentially how I feel about dev more broadly right now.
I can do the work. I enjoy the rote feeling of wielding an experts tools to practice my craft. It’s meditative, when I get into the coding zone.
But that captivating spark? It’s gone.
I’m writing here a lot less lately because I’ve been finding meaning outside of the web.
I’ve been feeding people through a community farm stand I started out of my home. I’ve been doing outreach to unhoused folks in my area.
I’ve been talking to strangers and reading books and riding my bike and exploring the little nooks and crannies of the new town I call home now.
I should probably write more about those things.