UI programming is actually the most fun you can have in many shops. How many developers are out there mind numbingly writing CRUD services to some ORM abstracti

UI programming is actually the most fun you can have in many shops. How many developers are out there mind numbingly writing CRUD services to some ORM abstraction? It's an easy life, but it's really no fun at all. With UIs, things change, feedback is far faster than in a service-only world, and there's a whole lot more freedom. For some of us, it's about as fun as things can get. You just have to be able to pay the price of understanding a bunch of infrastructure underneath, and the newer the technology, the worse the infrastructure gets, because it's buggier and incomplete. So as far as UI development goes, there's a bit of a technological ugly valley. Things are fun if you are on the bleeding edge, and building libraries yourself. They can also be fun if you are running on something mature and documented. It's the space in between that sucks. Now, the sad thing is that many places out there are choosing web technologies that are in this ugly valley. Just enough help to start to have expectations on getting things done quickly, but widgets that are one or two features away from what you want, and yet are almost impossible to extend well. So how do you survive UI programming? By being very careful about the tools you use.