This is a long, nuanced piece about progress in web-building technologies and practices. It’s written from a designer’s perspective, but many of the themes ring true to my developer’s brain.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you’ve been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.

The primary example cited is how we answer the simple question, “How do I put two things next to each other?” The status quo has changed (tables -> floats -> Flexbox -> CSS grids), but to what advantage?

A few of his points feel a bit like looking back at the “good ’ole days” through rose colored glasses, but his case is mostly well-reasoned and powerful.

the foundations are now sufficiently complicated enough on their own that it seems foolish to go add more optional complexity on top of it. I’ve kept my examples to the most basic of web implementations, and I haven’t touched on Javascript, animation, libraries, frameworks, pre-processors, package managers, automation, testing, or deployment. Whew.

Whew, indeed! The breadth and depth of knowledge required to feel competent in today’s web ecosystem is probably why we spend so much time dealing with imposter syndrome in this industry.