Everything Easy is NOT Hard Again.
So, it seems to have become a trend for people to write about how hard web development is these days compared to the past and I cannot tell you how annoying I find this trend. Basic websites are NOT hard to create. You don’t need Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, Vue, React or any one of the dozens (hundreds?) of other tools available to web developers these days. You don’t need VS Code, Brackets, Atom, Sublime Text with 35 extensions installed. You don’t need to understand GIT or SVN.
You need to understand HTML, CSS (optional) and have a text editor, and yes Notepad works just fine. That is literally it. Heck, with the advent of site generators like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly all you really need is a web browser and a connection to the internet to create a basic portfolio website that will be performant, attractive and inexpensive.
This is a website, albeit not a particularly attractive nor useful one, but it IS a website.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
<title>A Website</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Hi I am a website</h1>
</body></html>
Now, to be fair you’re going to need more than those couple of skills to create most modern websites, but you’d be amazed how far those skills alone will take you. You can create some truly impressive sites with HTML and CSS alone, sprinkle in some basic Javascript and you get even further.
But it isn’t the fact that these people writing these articles don’t seem to understand that, it’s this idea that because things have improved that is something to lament.
Oh NO I work in a tech related field and the technologies CHANGED! Whatever will I do?
Here’s a thought, learn. It’s that simple. If you got into a tech related field and thought what you learned in the beginning was going to be all you had to learn I have exactly zero sympathy for you. That just isn’t how tech works, and it never has been, oh, and it never will be either.
Being a developer of any sort is a process of balancing life, work, and learning. That is what you sign up for when you choose this career, if that isn’t what you wanted you should probably rethink your career choice rather than complaining that you have to learn new things.
I know a lot of developers, actual developers, and most of them actually cherish change, they certainly aren’t afraid of it, and they never complain about it. I am not sure the background of the people that write these articles, to be honest they mostly seem to be high profile designers that once could also develop because it was simple.
One article in particular almost made me mad reading it. I won’t link it because it’s a shit take on the industry that is mostly whining, but you can probably find it by searching the title of this article and removing the word “not”.
This person complained that putting things beside each other on a website keeps changing. First it was tables, then floats, then Flexbox and now Grid. Oh when will these changes stop (I urge you to read the word changes as improvements). Seriously? Anyone that creates websites for a living never wants to go back to using tables. Anyone that has done a complicated layout in Flexbox was ecstatic when Grid reached maturity and got support in all the major browsers. We certainly weren’t complaining because dozens of lines of CSS were reduced to a few lines that were far more legible, and that we could now just use tables for actually displaying tabular data.
In short, the technology improved, and this person is upset because they have to learn new things to keep up. I suppose it’s a good thing this person isn’t a doctor huh? Leeches! Leeches for all the things!
Yes. The tooling to set up new web projects can be daunting and if you’re new it can be confusing which tools to use, how to set up those tools and it can even be time consuming getting all those things to work. The thing the authors of these articles seem to forget is it’s a once and done proposition that saves immense amounts of time once they’re set up and generally produce better results than not using them.
I could probably make this a very long article talking about all the different wonderful tools we have at our disposal as web developers these days. From SASS to make writing CSS easier, to Babel which allows us to use modern Javascript and still be backwards compatible with older browsers. But that isn’t the point here. The point is very simple. If you got into a technology based career and expected nothing to change, or you lament changes that produce better products, because you had to learn something new and it was hard…. pick a new career. But for the love of all that is holy, stop writing these garbage articles complaining that things are actually better, but you’re too lazy to learn how to use the tools at your disposal.
