Think before you npm install

instead of doing it automatically every time, let’s take the time to pause and consider whether we really need to.

We need to identify exploitation. While there are some gleeful Full Stack Developers, many are computer scientists given too many responsibilities, and over things for which they are not willing or qualified to be held accountable.We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias. Even though we wouldn’t have computer science without pioneering women, interloping men have claimed it for themselves. Anything less than ‘real programming’ is now considered trivial, silly, artsy, female. That attitude needs to eat a poisoned ass.We need to revisit the separation of concerns principle. We simply can’t afford for people to have to know everything just to do something. It’s good that we conceptualize designs in terms of self-contained components now, but that can be a mental model without being a technology-specific land-grab.Most of all, we need to educate people who don’t code at all just how many different things different types of code can do, and how different each is to understand and write. Hopefully, this way, more of us will be writing the kind of code that suits us best, and not spending our time anxious and demoralized because we don’t know what we’re doing, or we simply have too much on our plate. That’s not to say that if you do take to JS, CSS, HTML, SQL, and C# you shouldn’t be writing all of them if you‘d like to and you have enough time!

as soon as a page is published online, we can’t predict how someone experiences it. Their screen might be wildly smaller or larger than mine, sure. But any number of factors might change the user’s experience: their network might be punishingly slow; their data plan could be stringently capped; they may use their voice to interact with my design; they may not see the screen like I do. In other words, we’ve never had any kind of control on the Web. And that lack of control can feel scary, sure — but if we approach it properly, it can be incredibly powerful.