Why I'm Grateful About the State of the Web in 2019

Remember JavaScript Fatigue?

Yeah. Back then I felt it too. There was a constant sense of not catching up with the tech. Did the Web mature enough that now I’m grateful about it?

The good old days…

Back in the good old days, just when I started, everything seemed so different. Most of the business logic was in the back end. No SPA, no Babel, no Prettier, no Webpack… Nothing but you, ES5, jQuery and Bootstrap. What a love story.

But then, everything changed when the Frameworks, Tools and ES2015 attacked.

The Fatigue

It’s a little bit dramatized. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. But it felt as if it did. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not even that old to think that time is flying.

Every change is difficult. But investing your precious time in learning a whole framework only to see it completely rewritten is… well too much.

It sucks not knowing where to start from. It’s not like that there are no great articles about these topics. There are! But with so much fragmentation in the market, it’s almost impossible to be great at everything and recommend something good.

Add some Yeoman, Babel, Webpack, Redux, GraphQL… and you can see the problem.

The realization

Maybe… we kinda missed the point.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” — Steve Jobs

So as a respect to this quote, let me remember you the things we did in the meantime. Hopefully, you will be so much… grateful:

We liberated ourselves from proprietary standards. R.I.P. IE and Flash.

We shifted the way we think about separation of concerns. Thanks, React.

We developed such amazing tools.

Hell yeah, we even brought our industry’s innovations into other platforms (and backported to the web). Thanks, Flutter.

And many more. Isn’t it… extraordinary? It’s just incredible that our experiments as a community have such an impact! So don’t you think that it was all worth it? And no, I don’t think the Web matured enough just yet. But it’s a good thing! It means that we’re yet to discover better ways to do our thing.

A brighter future

I wish the Web never gets mature enough and stops innovating. We can do so much great things together. Oh and don’t hate the language/framework/tool you don’t use. Times change and you don’t know who will innovate next.

That’s for now, ladies and gentlemen .