How I Build JavaScript Apps In 2021

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

How do build tools break backwards compatibility? | Go Make Things

If you have a project that uses just plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can just open up the files and start working on them at any time. A project from 20 years ago will still work just fine, and can be easily modified.

Projects that use build tools? Well… to work with them, you need your build tools to actually build. And that’s not always guaranteed.

Also, it me:

One of my least favorite things as a developer is wanting to do a quick patch fix on an older project—I’m talking a simple one-line of CSS kind of fix—but first having to spend 30 minutes patching my build tools to get them running again.

WTF is the Lean Web, anyways? | Go Make Things

Three principles:

1. Embrace the platform
2. Favor small, modular tools
3. Build a web for everyone

The New CSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

CSS is now the most powerful design tool for the Web.

I think this is now true. It’ll be interesting to see how this will affect tools and processes:

What I expect to see overall is that the perception and thus the role of CSS in the design process will change from being mainly a presentational styling tool at the end of the waterfall to a tool that is being used at the heart of making design decisions early on.