Users > developers

My biggest problem with modern web development is that it frequently prioritizes developers over users, and that’s completely ass backwards.

I’ve become a bit more nuanced with age.

I appreciate that the web continues to evolve, and libraries and new tech pave the cowpaths that eventually become browser standards. jQuery is why we got all the cool ES5 stuff. lodash and underscores helped lead the way for some ES6 stuff. JSX paved the way for template literals.

These libraries are “in production” experiments to helped us figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what we really need.

What I hate, though, is that the industry feverishly chases after these trends, and treats them as “the one right way” instead of “a unique approach for a specific set of use cases.”

And as always, its the user who suffers for the benefit (often imagined) of the developers.

These libraries aren’t free. They often result in tons of abstractions and lots of code that creates a more slow, buggy, and fragile user experience. Developer experience is important, but not at the expense of the user.

I’m excited about a new set of tools I see emerging that let you author in JavaScript, but compile to mostly HTML and a sprinkling of browser-native JS before shipping to a browser. But I also feel like, to an extent, we’re basically just reinventing PHP over-and-over again.

The future I’m most excited for?

It’s the next wave of the native web, where all a lot of the stuff we rely on libraries for today is baked into the platform, just before we begin the next slow decent into the trough of library hell.