I’m tired of web dev. I won’t stop working on it, but I’m tired.
I’ve never been a natural front-end dev. I’d much rather be working on APIs, databases, command-line tools, algorithms, and so on. But I work full-stack.
And I’m tired.
I’m tired of resolving complex, but poorly explained npm dependency issues.
I’m tired of debugging multi-layer caching issues.
I’m tired of testing and merging dependabot PRs.
I’m tired of trying to learn React and its idiosyncrasies when it’s a constantly moving target.
I’m tired of choosing between Next and Astro and npm and yarn and Bun and Deno and webpack and esbuild and Vite and SWC.
I’m tired of wondering where the heck WordPress is going and of logging in to something that’s changed again and that still feels like it’s shunned all the UI conventions that I know. And of wondering what all the people excited by this see that I don’t.
The web used to be fun and simple and easy to get stuff done with. Now it’s discovering that someone who doesn’t know what they were doing used a div instead of a button and fixing it involves half a day of frustratedly poking around files that make no sense and fixing a broken build process.
Is any other software process better?
Yes, I truly believe this is a bad world. Marketing hype has taken over, burdening us with perpetual intellectual and technical debt. Giving the illusion of helping us while actually hindering us.
I’m convinced that there MUST be a LOAD of JS/web developers who are killing it. Who have sharpened their tools and knowledge to such an extent that this world is one of wonder and awe.
Don’t get me wrong. I love learning new things. And am willing to do whatever is needed to get the job done. But I’m just not convinced that the things that the world says I “should” learn and use are the right things to learn and use. They may seem better for the short term “wow factor”. But they so quickly seem to become problematic, fragile, or obsolete. And yet the world keeps saying that they are the things I should learn and use.
I don’t get it. It makes no sense to me.
And I’m so tired.