People have dynamic conceptions of what it means to be a good developer. It started with making composable components which led to an inflation of components in a codebase. Connecting all these little things led to global state management, which led to stuff like Redux, which led to a second abstraction layer on top of composition. Doing this meant you are a good developer.

Now, types in Typescript for every little thing means you are a good developer. Not necessarily judicious use of types and small type footprints, but insane obsessive, compulsive, exhaustive list of types for even the most basic function signature. This is what it means to be a good developer.

What we lack as a group is the ability to have a sit down in the current and say ‘some of this is not needed, we tried it, it’s always worth a trying, but perhaps we can cut down on some of this granular component composition, perhaps we can only use a little bit of typescript, perhaps we can reduce state management’.

We don’t have the mechanism to self-reflect, so our only form of healing is to keeping barreling forward. In other words, lie to ourselves, and run from the problem.