Boring Web Development
Published on Oct 15, 2024, filed under development (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)
Are you one of the six hundred thousand people who have watched Martin Gutmann’s talk, Why Do We Celebrate Incompetent Leaders?
If not, I can recommend it—it’s an interesting talk, and watching it would help connect with this post!
This post is not picking up on Martin’s points around leadership, however. It’s about the parallels we can draw to web development: We may love celebrating the failures more than the successes, too.
Celebrating the Wrong Side of Web Development
| We celebrate… | …when instead we could celebrate… |
|---|---|
| a constant influx of new web standard features | sustained mastery of existing features |
| new HTML/CSS and JavaScript frameworks | using vanilla HTML/CSS and JavaScript, and maximizing use of existing frameworks |
| great performance on high-end connections and devices | good performance on low-end connections and devices |
| millions of web developers needing and trying to make something more accessible that user agents could make accessible | a couple of browser engines ensuring that what can be made accessible on their side, is being made accessible |
| AI-generating a complex web app | being able to hand-write a simple, valid website |
| site redesigns and relaunches | learning from good designs that have been cared for and optimized over long periods of time |
| people sacrificing their free time to provide free tooling, training, books, resources, projects | the community making sure people who do free work for them can do so and get by |
| moonshot visions | well-executed plans |
| how people produced something easily or quickly | when people did something challenging and time-consuming |
| recovering from dramatic security, reliability, or PR incidents | rarely having any security, reliability, or PR incidents |
| newly written code | freshly refactored code |
| developer experience (DX) | user experience (UX) |
(I’m not saying that you do this, nor that most do this. But I would say many do some of this.)
Successful Web Development Is Boring Web Development
When I take that table above, and feed it into the Jens-O-Dramatizer, I get this:
Boring but successful web development means brilliance in the basics. (Hat tip Jim Mattis.)
Boring but successful web development means constant improvements. (Boring but successful web development means maintenance.)
Boring but successful web development is as complex as necessary, but as simple as possible.
Boring but successful web development means all-around robust performance and accessibility (i.e., user experience) and code efficiency and maintainability (i.e., developer experience).
Boring but successful web development means knowing and supporting those who feed—supply, teach, train—the developer community.
Boring but successful web development means work.
Boring but successful web development means craft.
Boring but successful web development means quality.
Boring but successful web development means sustainability.
Boring but successful web development means humility.
Boring but successful web development means empathy.
There’s more, isn’t there? In web development, too, we crave the drama, we love the action, we need the heroes who fix what probably shouldn’t be broken.
And still, web development should be (and is) boring. No need for much of the drama and the action and the heroic fixes.
Well 🙂