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The Lean Web

A week or two ago, Thomas Fuchs gave a name to something I’ve been ranting about for a year or two: the lean web.

Is there a conference for web developers that specifically caters to “lean web” (don’t use JS if not necessary etc.)?

Or in other words, maintainable long-term apps and sites that don’t use the latest temporary hype

I’d love to see talks about how to ditch frameworks, do stuff with just HTML, CSS & vanilla JS, server-side generation etc

100% 👆.

Over the last couple of years, front end development has gotten a lot more complicated. Preprocessors, module loaders, package managers, ES6, command line tools, single page apps, CSS-in-JS, Angular, React, Vue, Cosmic (I made that last one up, but it sounds legit, right?).

It’s exhausting. It makes building for the web harder. It makes the sites and apps we build slower and more fragile.

It often makes the web worse.

I’ve been working on a conference talk around this topic that’s focused on how to build modern, engaging websites and web apps without all of the cruft. All you need is a web browser and text editor.

The lean web. Let’s make this a thing!