The web is good now
Chris Coyier's recent talk at CascadiaJS 2022, titled "The Web Is Good Now", makes me feel pretty good about the developer experience—and the user experience that it enables!—of building on the web.
A lot of the mindshare of the modern web is tied to organisations (usually companies) with a vested interest in promoting their tool or library. The hype machine churns powerfully in the web development space, each new announcement generating more buzz than the last: OG Image Generation from Vercel, new docs at React, WebC integrated into Eleventy, which by the way deploys seamlessly on Netlify. None of this is bad—these are all great tools for building better experiences online—but it is exhausting, and it persists this notion that the web is a treadmill: you keep up, or you fall off.
Most of what Chris Coyier covers in his talk, however (with the exception of a plug for Cloudinary, whose service he admits has become overcommoditised), pertains to the web as a platform. New language features in CSS or JavaScript aren't services to opt in to—you've opted into them automatically by working in the browser! They're a rising tide rather than a bigger shinier boat.
Next
Destroyer's show, much like their music, was intimate and suave and mysterious and wholly exciting—another one off the bucket list.
Previous
Thinking a little bit more about why I keep this blog an what I want to achieve with it (if anything).