(2022-01-31) Bjarnason How To Keep Up With Web Development Without Falling Into Despair

Baldur Bjarnason: How to keep up with web development without falling into despair. People say that web development is unique because of the fast pace and volume of changes in the field.

It is unique in overwhelming those of us who practise it, but it isn’t uniquely fast-paced

First, I’ll tell you about the two approaches that work in other fields but won’t work in web dev because we actually do kind of suck

1. Other fields have collective or institutional filters

web dev does not invest in itself as a field

2. They specialise

Web dev is unique in how we’ve been trying to roll back the specialisation of the field with notions like Full Stack Web Devs.

There’s one more thing that many fields do that web dev doesn’t. It’s a tactic we can copy as individuals without waiting for a broken industry to fix itself.

3. They stop “Keeping Up” and instead do Research

Instead of keeping up with what everybody else is doing, research the task at hand. You let work guide you.

Web dev as a field doesn’t have a common research methodology or standard tactics for keeping up with change. That’s why we’re all overwhelmed

We don’t teach people to ask the right questions.

You only check out articles, podcasts, or videos that are directly relevant to your Work Questions. (More on that later.) Even then, you still don’t read, watch, or listen to them. You scan them above the fold and ask yourself: Can I defer reading this until I’m doing the task?

If it doesn’t touch on one of your long-term goals and isn’t a reference you can use later on to guide you in a task, stop reading and close the tab.

If it’s important it’ll come across your feed again and again. Paradigm-shifting changes in web dev are rare (AJAX, jQuery, React, CSS Media Queries, CSS Grid, CSS Variables, ESM modules). When they do arrive they’ll become so loud

If it does touch on a Work Question you generally need to do a first-pass read to decide how important it is?

For example, one of my Work Questions is “How can I make a web UI that doesn’t feel flat but also isn’t a skeuomorphic cartoon pastiche of real-world objects?”. Anything that touches on filters, gradients, or texture effects in CSS will catch my interest

How do we choose our Work Questions? (Working Questions)

You can start with many vague questions and, as you do your research, you either cross them off or rephrase them to become more specific.

For example, here are the questions that guide my web dev research when it comes to my Colophon Cards project:....

You’ll note that these questions range from the high level to the low level. Some of them focus on practical details of a specific technology. Others are more ‘chewable’. Some of them are specific and will eventually have a clear answer. Others are open-ended and represent the ongoing development of a work philosophy or outlook.

I set aside about an hour or two a day for research.