Charlie Owen: “The Real Dark Web”

As a corollary of sorts to my last post, I offer this thought-provoking piece by Charlie Owen on what web development is like for the vast majority of developers:

The reality for most, well, web developers is very different from this. Most web developers are working on very ‘boring’ teams. They’re producing workhorse products that serve the organisation needs. They aren’t trying to innovate. They aren’t trying to impress the next recruiter with their CV. They simply want to get paid, produce a solution that works, and go home.

[…]

Perhaps the client-side framework developed by a multi-billion dollar company isn’t the one that you should be pushing into the browser of your local grocery website? Perhaps the buildchains that require ancient dark magick to invocate are not appropriate on a team that simply compiles some Sass to CSS?

I love reading about the latest “bleeding edge” techniques for building websites. But most of the time, just give me plain ol’ HTML and vanilla CSS, with a smidge of JavaScript here and there. Via