I am not a web developer. Notwithstanding this fact I have been doing web development almost every year for the past two decades. This has helped me see a recurring trend: every year I find that all the things I hated about web development have been replaced by new and exciting things. These exciting things keep their glittery shine for about six months, tarnish, wither, and become hated. I then retire from web development forever (meaning: until the following year.)

Currently I am in the honeymoon phase with React. This is after a brief love affair with Angular. I think my relationship with React will last longer because it is just so much cooler than Angular… (nevermind when my ex says “that’s what you said about me after you ditched jQuery!” Everyone knows its impossible to ditch jQuery)

The other thing of note is how many stinkin’ development tools are born every year. I was just brushing up on open source ecommerce offerings last week and stumbled upon a dozen or so. Widdling this down by filtering out inactive projects (based on github commit graphs), I found a few that seemed like good candidates. Of course this led me to some of the underlying frameworks supporting these products: composer (php – ihk; I loathe anything relating to php), meteor, electrode (from walmart labs of all places!), hapi.js, etc. What are all these heretofore-unknown-but-now-pivitol-groundbreaking frameworks?

It never ceases to amaze me how much time is spent on doing, then re-doing frameworks and toolkits. Could we solve the worlds shortage of developer problem by passing some law to limit needless duplication of efforts in creating frameworks? Maybe if we linked excess framework creation to carbon emissions Bernie sanders could jump in and help.

Perhaps toolkits and frameworks are the only fitting artifacts that a developer can leave behind for posterity. All the application code written is usually for a company, and therefore kept closed source, will likely never see the light of day. What does any good developer do besides create abstractions?

As an aside I also found it amusing to see a similar trend with amazon – no longer just s3 and ec2, they have all kinds of petabyte scale storage (including one offering that involves driving a semi truck to your business to extract up to 100 petabytes of data), lambda, snowball, blah blah, etc. Not open source, but in the same vein of neverending innovation…