Being a web generalist

I too am a generalist. The longer way of saying it is that I like to solve all of the problems and want complete control.

Nice article!

One should strive to be a jack of all trades and king of some.

I'd been used to working all areas of the stack and recently took a 'front-end' position, I'm finding the focus a bit limiting.

I've been web generalizing since ~1995.

I'd say it's becoming much harder to maintain something close to the forefront of knowledge in all areas (ie. generalise).

Once upon a time every HTML tag and every browser quirk, was something you could remember. Javascript was a toy. People still did ecommerce without HTTPS. We still wrote tags in <CAPS>. We wrote tags instead of generating them.

At least one good thing happened in all this time: the death of flash.

But now we have serious scripting, DOM manipulation, SVG, canvas, 24x7x365 uptime targets, redundancy and scaling. Sophisticated attackers. DDoS. Increasing layers of bullshit hoops just for functional email. Global reach - multilingual, multi-directional text that varies so much in shape and form you can't easily use a single stylesheet or layout for. Instant messaging and social networks. The internet's logical geography of access latencies. Adaptive GeoDNS responses. Combine that with mobile, now the globally dominant internet access methodology, which has made deployment a lot more difficult, particularly if you really need to hit all platforms, unify code and styling across your app and web experience, and you want to hook native features otherwise unavailable. There are possible pipelines, sure, but it's far from trivial to hit all platforms, hit them well, maintain control and testing. Payments is still a pain in the ass, if you want to support a few locales, and/or small payments and/or real time digital service provision (impossibly expensive with cards due to chargeback risk).

So, my fellow renaissance peeps, I must confess: I saw the title and thought this post was going to sound the death of the web generalist.

As it stands, it's more an assertive statement of "don't lock me in an organizational box", which remains very intelligent, but perhaps doesn't really reveal much otherwise. (Though HR people should get with the program!)