Software Crisis 2.0 – Baldur Bjarnason
Baldur Bjarnason writes an immense treatise on the current sad state of software, grounded in the historical perspective of the past sad state of software.
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The Single-Page-App Morality Play – Baldur Bjarnason
I keep seeing Single-Page-Apps with huge JS files that only, in terms of concrete User Experience (UX) benefits, deliver client-side validation of forms plus analytics. Apps rarely leverage the potential of a Single-Page-App. It’s still just the same ‘click, wait for load’ navigation cycle. Same as the one you get with Multi-Page-Apps. Except buggier and with a much slower initial loading time.
When you look at performance, cross-platform and mobile support, reliability, and accessibility, nearly every Single-Page-App you can find in the wild is a failure on multiple fronts.
Replacing those with even a mediocre Multi-Page-App is generally going to be a substantial win. You usually see improvements on all of the issues mentioned above. You get the same general UX except with more reliable loading, history management, and loading features—provided by the browser.
Before you dismiss Baldur as a hater based on what I’ve just quoted, you should really read the whole article. The issue he points to is not with the technical architecture of single page apps, but with management.
Single-Page-Apps can be fantastic. Most teams will mess them up because most teams operate in dysfunctional organisations.
A lot of what he says really resonates with me. Over and over again I’ve seen projects where the technical decison around which monolithic client-side JavaScript framework to use has been made even before a problem has been defined.
Baldur’s conclusion chimes a lot with what I’ve been saying in conference talks this year: the biggest challenges facing the web are not technical in nature.
The biggest hindrance to the web’s progress isn’t non-expert developers, tooling, libraries, Single-Page-Apps, or Multi-Page-Apps.
It’s always humans.
Over-engineering is under-engineering – Baldur Bjarnason
Following on from that link about the battle between control vs. using what the browser already gives you, Baldur sums up the situation:
To pick a specific example: the problem with an over-engineered form is that the amount of code required to replace no engineering (i.e. native form controls with basic styling) is enormous and almost always only partially successful (i.e. under-engineered).
They are under-engineered because they are over-engineered—tried to replace native controls.
And so we get two schools of engineering thought:
- Keep it simple.
- Control everything, even though that means reimplementing everything in JavaScript.
If, as it’s starting to look like from my perspective, these two communities are incapable of learning from each other, then maybe we should start consider some sort of community divorce?
We get HTML, CSS, and SVG. We love that shit and you just keep stuffing it into the JavaScript sack whenever you are left alone with it.
You get to keep WebGL, Shadow DOM, WASM, React, and Angular.
(I know which group I’d rather be in.)
The Web Falls Apart – Baldur Bjarnason
This isn’t a “the web is doomed, DOOMED, I tells ya” kind of blog post. It’s more in the “the web in its current form isn’t sustainable and will collapse into a simpler, more sustainable form, possibly several” genre.
Baldur points to the multiple causes of the web’s current quagmire.
I honestly have no idea on how to mitigate this harm or even how long the decline is going to take. My hope is that if we can make the less complex, more distributed aspects of the web safer and more robust, they will be more likely to thrive when the situation has forced the web as a whole to break up and simplify.
Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development – Baldur Bjarnason
The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now.
Baldur is really feeling the dev perception.
Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software it’s all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community.
Making Colophon Cards – Baldur Bjarnason
I think Baldur is onto something here with his categorisation of software. There’s the software based on innovation, something truly novel:
Innovation’s the word. Pushing the boundaries. You know the phrases. Usually spouted by that dude at the party.
Then there’s the software based on itertion, making a better version of a proven tool:
We are now in a place where we have entire genres of software that have decades of history, are backed by stacks of new and old research, have dozens of successful, well-made exemplar apps, and a broad enough conceptual space to allow for new variations on the theme.
In short, we have genre software and we have avant-garde software, and I’ve always been more interested in genre fiction than literary fiction.
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies – Baldur Bjarnason
This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.
I don’t care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps – Baldur Bjarnason
The problem I’ve regularly encountered in my work is that I don’t get to do my job the way I think is best for both me and my employer or client. The employer, who isn’t the web development expert, almost always has a clear idea of what real web development is supposed to look like: Single-Page-Apps and React (or React-like frameworks).
An intimation that it wouldn’t be the right solution for this particular problem is taken as an admission of incompetence.
I’ve experienced this. And I think this observation is even more true when it comes to recruitment.
AI and Asbestos: the offset and trade-off models for large-scale risks are inherently harmful – Baldur Bjarnason
Every time you had an industry campaign against an asbestos ban, they used the same rhetoric. They focused on the potential benefits – cheaper spare parts for cars, cheaper water purification – and doing so implicitly assumed that deaths and destroyed lives, were a low price to pay.
This is the same strategy that’s being used by those who today talk about finding productive uses for generative models without even so much as gesturing towards mitigating or preventing the societal or environmental harms.
New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason
The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.
The mainstreaming of ‘AI’ scepticism – Baldur Bjarnason
- Tech is dominated by “true believers” and those who tag along to make money.
- Politicians seem to be forever gullible to the promises of tech.
- Management loves promises of automation and profitable layoffs.
But it seems that the sentiment might be shifting, even among those predisposed to believe in “AI”, at least in part.
The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason
A depressing but accurate description of the economics of web development.
React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason
An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:
React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.
Generated images for non-generated text and video – Baldur Bjarnason
Using extruded synthetic art will not do your writing or video any favours in the long run.
Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management – Baldur Bjarnason
The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.
It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.
Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless? – Baldur Bjarnason
I’d like to suggest that everybody in web dev point their dysfunctional novelty seeking (of which I suffer as well) in the direction of HTML and CSS. See how much can be done without JavaScript. It’s a lot! Then look at writing more lightweight JavaScript that’s layered on top of the HTML as enhancements. Because it’s an enhancement and not required for functionality, you can cut the line higher and use newer tech without worry.
See how refreshing that feels.
Making or using generative ‘AI’ is, all else being equal, a dick move – Baldur Bjarnason
Because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean you can do it without repercussions. In this case, the consequences are very much on the mild side: if you use LLMs or diffusion models, a relatively small group of mostly mid- to low-income people who are largely underdogs in their respective fields will think you’re a dick.
Baldur Bjarnason -
This is kind of brilliant:
Maybe what’s needed for websites and web apps is a kind of Prepper Web Dev?
What do I need to read to be a great at CSS? – Baldur Bjarnason
I like this approach to reading widely and staying up to date enough.
W3C and EME: it isn’t about preventing DRM but saving the W3C – Baldur Bjarnason
A damning assessment of Tim Berners-Lee’s defeatist portrayal of the W3C:
No matter which side is right, the W3C faces an existential crisis.
Either:
- The W3C is a shepherd of the web for all, the web on everything, and a web of trust. But now it is fundamentally compromising its own principles in the name of maintaining industry relevance.
- Or, the W3C is merely an industry body for browser vendors to collaborate and its mission statement is nothing more than PR to increase buy-in from the smaller, largely powerless, members.
Both can’t be true. Neither is good news for the organisation.
Is JavaScript more fragile? – Baldur Bjarnason
Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.
This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.
The Tragedy/Farce of the Open Web according to journalists – Baldur Bjarnason
Continuous web death.
The modern journalist is not an expert on the web. They and their colleagues have spent a large part of the last twenty-five years dismissing the open web at every stage. They are not the people you can trust to either accurately assess the web or to make usable websites. You can’t even trust them to make sensible decisions about web strategy. Just look at their damn websites!
A few quick links and thoughts on big web problems – Baldur Bjarnason
The system makes the website. Don’t blame the web developer, blame the organisation. A web developer embedded in a large system isn’t the one making the websites.
To make a progressively enhanced website that performs well and loads quickly even on slow connections, you need to first make an organisation that values those qualities over others.
The web is not dying | Go Make Things
A counterpart to the piece by Baldur that I linked to yesterday:
There are many challenges to face as the web grows.
Most of them are people problems. Habits. Inertia. A misalignment of priorities with user needs. Those can be overcome.
The Intelligence Illusion
Baldur has new book coming out:
The Intelligence Illusion is an exhaustively researched guide to the business risks of Generative AI.