You won't scale

One of the more common myths I try to debunk around vanilla JavaScript and simpler approaches to web development is that they don’t scale (they do, actually).

So I really enjoyed this post on Mastodon from tante…

You won’t grow to Google/Amazon scale. It’s fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

I really wish this was the norm in our industry.

I’m thankfully starting to see the pendulum swing back away from overly complex solutions. Static HTML with islands of interactivity is starting to get more popular. React is finally in a state of decline.

tante also wrote a bit about why these more complex tools are often the wrong choice for a moderately sized team…

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn’t fail while showing a basically static page.

If you have a complex site you’re trying to detangle into something more manageable, get in touch. I’ve helped lots of companies you’ve heard of do just that, and would love to work with you!

If you’re starting from scratch and want to make sure you build simplicity and maintainability in from the start, I can help with that, too!

And if you want to learn how to do stuff like that yourself, I run a few workshops a year on building for the web.