Even though the day-to-day of my career has taken me pretty far away from the front-end, drawing boxes on the screen and making them purdy is still one of my favorite things to do. While I’m not a visual designer, I still enjoy the immediacy and satisfaction of being able to build a thing that I can look at and interact with.

The world of front-end development has become very complex, and is constantly evolving. Some of those evolutions have brought the web platform forward in fantastic ways, like CSS Grid, Flexbox, and myriad new pseudo-classes–so much more pleasant and simple than the days of making do with floats and absolute positioning. The rise of JavaScript SPAs, TypeScript, and build-systems have brought new waves of interactivity, and reactivity, but to my mind the Reactification of the web has made it less approachable and accessible to the average person. It also costs more to develop and maintain over an application’s life. I’ve been heartened by the arrival of Hypermedia style libraries like Datastar and HTMX, and other projects which have sought to make the web less complex and more approachable again, all without losing its current super-powers.

Most of the complexity of the current web stack has become inversely correlated to how well the website performs, both in terms of speed and user joy. The more of that complexity I have been able to strip out of the stack, the more joy I have regained in practicing this aspect of the craft.