At Mozilla and Microsoft we kept running into the same issue: web products with tons of senseless HTML, mostly unused CSS and an absolute avalanche of JavaScript sent to the end users with no benefit to them. All the benefits were for the convenience of the developers and the flexibility to build whatever with a framework that promised optimised output.

Web languages are often seen as compile targets.

This is exactly what App stores were advertised as to prevent. The web was a wild, untamed and terribly unsafe place full of software you can’t trust. App stores, instead, are curated and safe havens of only tested and tried, genuine software. Until someone pays enough to get their app listed with the right keywords.

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

search engine results have become advertising in disguise, with the first 10 results either being flat out ads or those who spent a lot of money on advertising or shifty SEO tricks to show up first. It’s like a run-down shopping mall, with no local products or employees and chain stores selling knock-off products rather than the high quality ones.

Wow, that kind of nails it right on the head. I think very specific technical queries still give decent results but anything consumer, like “best laptop for college kids”, is absolutely worthless.

why should HTML and CSS ever be respected by people who call themselves “real developers” when almost any code soup results in something consumable? There are hardly any ramifications for coding mistakes, which means that over the years we focused on developer convenience rather than the quality of the end result.

…The web is ripe for attacks because of its lenience in what developers can throw at it.

Going back to the main design principle of the web where the user should get the best result and be our main focus. And not how easy it is to build a huge system in 20 minutes with x lines of code. Just because the resilience of the web means our code does not break doesn’t mean it works.

One big step towards becoming a tech lead is to use your experience to help people grow. Not to let your horrible memories taint possible great new things to come

there is a lot more gamification and “growth hacking” at play than publishing good content and hoping for an audience.

We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it.

Browsers can’t break the web. They need to support the bleeding edge but also the sins of the past.

Great point by Christian Heilmann. Browsers, of all software, have it tough. Give ’em a break sometimes.