I have a lot of sympathy for the arguments made here. I strongly agree with avoiding overcomplicated processes and tools. When you start spending noticeable am

I have a lot of sympathy for the arguments made here. I strongly agree with avoiding overcomplicated processes and tools. When you start spending noticeable amounts of time trying to figure out your build process or how to manage your hosting infrastructure, to pick two repeat offenders, something is wrong. The overwhelming majority of web apps simply aren’t that complicated, and building and deploying them shouldn’t be complicated either. Like the author, I am a big fan of tools like Parcel that have one job, do it well, and mostly “just work”. Virtual hat tip to Caddy as a web server for similar reasons. I think some of the more recent build tools like Snowpack and esbuild are worth watching too. All of these tools share the common theme that they attempt to make routine jobs simple, automatic and fast, so developers can get on with developing useful software. In some ways, I take almost the opposite view when it comes to writing code. I tend to start almost everything from a clean slate, and usually I end up using a relatively small set of libraries, carefully chosen for each project, for productivity. I rarely use a heavyweight framework, as I think the benefits they offer are much more limited than their popularity would suggest and the potential long-term costs they come with are often underestimated. I almost never use scaffolding tools, for similar reasons. I suspect this apparent dichotomy is a bit like what you build and what you outsource in a startup. There is the core idea, which is where you’re creating value, and you want to be as flexible and productive as possible in that area. For everything else that is necessary but not the unique part of what you’re doing, you want to be involved as little as possible. Outsourcing that stuff is good, but outsourcing 80% of something and still having to do the other 20% but on someone else’s terms is often the worst position of all.