Merchants of Complexity

I've been experimenting with nobuild javascript lately, doing as much as I can with css instead of code, using htmx for the basic stuff, responding to events with clean vanilla js (with jsdoc for types) for what comes next and at some point if I absolutely need to go more complex, I'll build out the functionality using self-contained web components.

No build tool, no meta-compiler, everything is browser ready the second I type it. I might not even minify the code.

I'm not sure the experiment will succeed, but I'm hoping to build a paradigm that works with the browser instead of against it. I'm sure a lot of people will hate it, but I'm so burnt out on the typescript/node/react build chain that I'm having a lot of fun exploring a wildly different approach.

I think much of the recent complexity comes from resume driven development in an over saturated job market. It's also seemingly popular to use shiny tech as a sort of distraction to keep investors from realizing you don't actually have a business plan written down anywhere.

There are still some dark corners in B2B software consulting that very strongly embrace the simple solutions path. Many in boring, overlooked industries. Oftentimes these areas are so inherently complicated you would get laughed out of the room for pushing shiny tech. For instance, back office accounting tools for a bank that manage critical make-break decisions around customer relationships. Go ahead and pitch your bespoke sql db and AI integration to these people and see how their due diligence team responds.

Complexity and many components interacting tend to break. And for each component on its own, for the author to push a new major version with a few breaking changes is a small effort, but for the end developer consuming all those components, it all sums up in a huge maintenance cost.