Ever get the feeling that modern web dev has become… a bit too complex?
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the “good old days”. When you could just write some code, compile it, and run it without worrying about all the dependencies, the build tools, the client-side rendering, the server-side rendering, the server components, and all the other buzzwords that are thrown around in the web dev world… just code doing its thing.
And honestly, I think that feeling isn’t totally wrong. Maybe we can make things simpler, faster, more straightforward again.
So naturally… I decided to embrace the future by going back to the past: COBOL.
Here’s my (100% serious, definitely not questionable) migration story.
The real alternative is much more simple - static HTML + CSS with manual deployment and manual file transfer. If that’s not enough, you can step-by-step add to it. There certainly are web applications that benefit from the complex defaults. I don’t hate these tools per se. I hate that they are the default. Yet it only makes that most web developers need a job and to get that job they need to use an overkill stack for their personal and community projects.
If you want to hear an upside, just remember that this happens everywhere and at least the modern web dev chaos is mostly built on top of free and open-source tools and not proprietary bullshit.
When I was a noob learning web dev a few years back and had no sense of direction and I was doing these tutorials on Youtube where you build a 0 user CRUD app with like NextJS, typescript, all sorts of libraries for state management, data fetching, css, auth ,forms, tables, UI components, database ORM’s.
It’s just such nonsense, especially if you’re a noob getting into all of this stuff. You think you need to know all of this so you spend your time learning more how to use these tools rather than actually solving interesting problems and learning to code. The whole ecosystem, including the content creators just encourage this.
I didn’t even host my own DB, who has time for that? Just sign up for this service they do it for you bro. And at the end you would just host your site on Vercel.
And don’t get me started of how quickly things just completely change there.
Modern web dev is a jungle and a mess. Complexity is the default, not something you add on later so I completely agree on your point.
Yes, but… Have you heard of Eleventy? Feed it some Markdown, and it spits out stylish HTML. Then you can transfer.