Breath of fresh air. I think they drill the concept of scalability into kids heads these days that they think they have to build an insanely complex cloud stack for an app that may not even succeed let alone scale. So all that money and time gets wasted while it could have been spent on UX.

Don’t get me wrong, alls should be reasonably scalable. But it’s so easy to upgrade the shape of a EC2 instance and your RDS instance that I don’t even think about it. I can set up a CDN with cloudfront and S3 in about 5 minutes.

You have to consider that the lifecycle of an app is very short. You’re lucky to get five years out of your code base before it undergoes a complete rewrite. It didn’t use to be, that’s for sure. I maintained Perl/CGI sites well into the mid 2000s and I developed in PHP for over 20 years. I only began using laravel a couple years ago. Before then it was vanilla PHP.

I also agree with you on over dependence of libraries. Now ones like lodash or sharp are tried and true and will likely be around for years to come. But libraries, specifically front end libraries cause a lot of problems. They also cause severe bloat. Framer motion one of the most popular animation libraries is massive and so many people use it. Even on SEO-sensitive sites!

You sir deserve the title of senior! Thanks for this article. You kids listen to him now 🫡