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.

Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

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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.

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Cold-blooded software

Warm-blooded software:

Maybe your CI isn’t working because one of the services you depend on got bought or ran out of money. You add a new dependency and find yourself needing to upgrade your compiler. Another package you depend on is deprecated, and doesn’t work with the latest version of the compiler.

I aspire to build cold-blooded software:

You work alone, make some changes when you’re inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or three.

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Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit • Lea Verou

I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.

Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.

Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.

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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

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How to build lean efficient websites in 2023 | Go Make Things

  1. Start with mostly static HTML.
  2. Progressively enhance the dynamic parts.
  3. Pick small, focused tools.

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