Skip to main content Accessibility Feedback

The elite priesthood of developers

This entire interview with Jeremy Keith is pure gold, but this quote in particular really resonated with me.

My greatest fear for the web is that it becomes the domain of an elite priesthood of developers. I firmly believe that, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, “this is for everyone.” And I don’t just mean it’s for everyone to use—I believe it’s for everyone to make as well. That’s why I get very worried by anything that raises the barrier to entry to web design and web development.

It’s ironic that, at the same time as we can do so much more with less when it comes to the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in browsers, many developers are choosing to make things more complicated by introducing complex tool chains, frameworks and processes. I understand that a certain amount of scaffolding and tooling is necessary, especially when you’re working at scale, but I do get worried about the long-term effects.

One of the biggest challenges I hear from people learning JavaScript for the first is how overwhelming and complicated the modern developer process seems.

Preprocessors, module loaders, package managers, ES6, command line tools, single page apps, CSS-in-JS, Angular, React, Vue, [the next new hotness]. It’s exhausting.

This is why I’m such a big proponent of vanilla JavaScript and minimal tooling. I love being able to just open a browser and a text editor and make things. It’s liberating.

And I love being able to share that with people like you.