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Hot take: the web technology toolchain is plenty powerful as it is, and expanding it will cause more problems through misuse of newer features than it would cre

Hot take: the web technology toolchain is plenty powerful as it is, and expanding it will cause more problems through misuse of newer features than it would create solutions. Yes, web standards offer loads of tools that let developers and designers get _really_ creative with their work, but we've reached a point where many of us are spoiled for choice, and loads of the mainline options are used, abused, or otherwise ill-optimised to the point of making many websites heavy enough to turn many laptops into space heaters. Worse still, the "spoiled for choice" factor means that people keep finding radically new ways to use the toolchain; while this is arguably not a bad thing in isolation, it makes it _so_ difficult to keep up with what you're _supposed_ to use at any given time.

drawkbox 7y ago
Technology and progress is great, but deciding on what to use is becoming like browsing for something to watch on Netflix (or other streaming services). Lots of the time we spend deciding, dealing with devtools and toolchains, and debugging magic helpers or abstractions on top of abstractions (and I love good abstraction), that takes time away from what we are building, the product. Simple is good, complexity is bad unless it is simple layers/parts but not too many you have to deal with, simplification is good, refactoring is necessary at this stage. In a way there is a choice technical debt. Move fast and break things, sometimes the 'break things' part of that is adhered to a little too much. Engineering/product development is taking complexity and simplifying it, are we doing that? Or are we adding complexity where it was simple? I am looking forward to the next great simplification wave.
dfcmt 7y ago
It's in the interest of big corporations (like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft) that making a browser is as complicated as possible so they face no competition.

drawkbox 7y ago

Technology and progress is great, but deciding on what to use is becoming like browsing for something to watch on Netflix (or other streaming services). Lots of the time we spend deciding, dealing with devtools and toolchains, and debugging magic helpers or abstractions on top of abstractions (and I love good abstraction), that takes time away from what we are building, the product. Simple is good, complexity is bad unless it is simple layers/parts but not too many you have to deal with, simplification is good, refactoring is necessary at this stage. In a way there is a choice technical debt. Move fast and break things, sometimes the 'break things' part of that is adhered to a little too much. Engineering/product development is taking complexity and simplifying it, are we doing that? Or are we adding complexity where it was simple? I am looking forward to the next great simplification wave.

dfcmt 7y ago

It's in the interest of big corporations (like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft) that making a browser is as complicated as possible so they face no competition.