Cold-blooded software

Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:

• Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
• The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
• It’s All About the Trade-Offs
• It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
• Communication, Communication, Communication!

And there’s this:

You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built). node_modules is like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.

Make it boring — jlwagner.net

People are propelled by their interests, and web developers have a lot of space to be interested in all sorts of stuff. For you, it may be JavaScript ‘n Friends, or HTML and CSS. Maybe it’s all that stuff, but put aside your preferences for a moment and answer me this: what are you helping people to do? If the answer involves any remotely routine or crucial purpose, consider putting aside your personal desire for excitement. Instead, make boring things that are usable, accessible, and fast. Ours is a job done by people for people, not a glamorous rockstar gig.

Excellent advice from Jeremy who wants us to build fast, reliable, resilient websites …even if the technologies involved in doing that don’t feel exciting.

Central to that endeavor is recognizing that the browser gives you a ton of stuff for free. Relying on those freebies requires a willingness to not npm install a solution for every problem — especially those that are best solved with CSS and HTML. Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible. When we rely wholesale on JavaScript to build for the web, we’re inevitably reinventing things. At worst, our reinventions of rock-solid HTML features — such as client-side form validation  — break in unexpected ways despite our carefully written tests. At best, a flawless reimplementation of those features adds unnecessary code to applications, and depends on a technology less fault-tolerant than CSS and HTML.