Tom MacWright on the pendulum swinging back and forth between simple and “fancy”

Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear.

Tom MacWright shared some concerns for SPAs place in the modern web and followed it up with a post sharing suggestions to use instead.

The SPA pattern (Single-Page Apps), I tried to define, was about the React model, which also covers, to a large extent, the model of Vue, Angular, and other frontend frameworks.

Like any critique, it begs for a prescription and I didn’t give one, other than gesturing toward server-side frameworks like Rails and Django. But I think there are some trends starting to form. I had queued up some time to really dive into the frameworks, but things like walking in parks have taken priority, so here’s just a grand tour.