Boring Web Development

Published on October 15, 2024, filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

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.

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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 🙂

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)