Everything Easy Is Hard Again

Thanks to Charlie, I ran across this great Frank Chimero piece on Everything Easy Is Hard Again, a transcript of a talk he gave in Berlin on the changing nature of the web. Specifically, he speaks on the ever growing complexities of getting started making websites and the near-futile nature of trying to read modern day source code.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you've been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.

This does sound familiar to me. I'm in roughly the same boat as Chimero (in terms of tech, he is clearly far more successful) as I started with simple HTML, learned CSS, learned Javascript, learned PHP and then had to re-learn them all again as progressive enhancements were made. I find many of these new tech tools to be wonderful but also feel myself up against a barrier occasionally as learning something like React is not as simply as learning how Flexgrids work.

While I don't think his insights apply to people working at a small scale (you probably don't need a package manager or a robust framework of backend tech if you're just building a simple website), I do think it's a solid read for anyone that works on the web. His desire for the web to be an accessible, and legible, place is irrefutable, especially as someone that learned most of what they know from View Source.