I think there's been a much bigger change in (particularly front end) web development over the last decade, and that's that the underlying technology is now a l

I think there's been a much bigger change in (particularly front end) web development over the last decade, and that's that the underlying technology is now a lot less experimental. Wind back to 2010, and websockets was new and fun, webRTC was coming up, there were loads of interesting possibilities about how the web could be used, HTML5 was new/coming, compilers (sass, gulp, etc.) were perceived as a benefit as they took away from common repetitive tasks, KnockoutJS and Ember were trying new approaches (that eventually turned into Angular/React/Vue). It felt like the possibilities were endless, and the future was ours for the taking. Now, it feels like we (as the global web community) have entered a period of stability - all of the decisions have been made. - Frameworks win (and broadly speaking, React, Angular and Vue are all very similar to use, give or take a bit). - You need to write tests, because front end applications contain more behaviour (which used to belong to the backend) - Build tools win for a host of reasons (babel allowing future JS features early, type checking, etc.). (As an aside - the logical conclusion of lots of nice build tools is... lots of nice build tools (and therefore boilerplate)) - Experimental technologies (webrtc and web sockets, among others) are "gimmicky" or "niche" - useful in small amounts - Designs are all the same (hyperbolically speaking) - want a product page? give it a horizontal three-column layout showing a free tier and two pricing options. Use Bootstrap, or roll something out that approximates it. For me, there used to be an excitement that there could be a new core frontend web technology every few months - that excitement doesn't exist now. But... that doesn't mean that it's not fun to work in web development anymore. It is the people that have changed and become more limiting, not the technology and possibilities (which have only grown over the last 20 years). And by people, I mean you (you're not 14 anymore), me, clients, managers, users - everyone. With stability come expectations!