Alex RussellFeb 5, 2023

Yet another team at work staring down months of remediation thanks to "modern frontend" has caused me to write down why I've been *intensely* frustrated with the clearly broken market for web technology over our long lost decade:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

Thanks to @brucelawson, @heydon, Taylor Hunt, @andy, and @phae for spotting errors in (even more splenetic) drafts.

The Market for Lemons

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?

Alex Russell
Show threadDmitri KalintsevFeb 5, 2023

@slightlyoff The mention of DX above all has brought to memory post by 1password dev team where they talked about switching to Electron, mainly in the name of making lives of their devs’ easier. To their long time loyal customer, it felt like a bit of a betrayal, to be frank, given Electron’s track record.

I know this isn’t about frontend / JS, but kind of felt somehow related.

Show threadAlex Russell

@dkalintsev In the sense that what's *actually* wrong is a substitution of value for developers for value to users, it's 100% on-point.

That said, Electron isn't what made 1PW vulnerable, and x-platform tech isn't bad per sae. There should be counterbalances to our optimisation ambitions...but they should be more prevalent in the conversation than excuses for not optimising at all.

Feb 5, 2023 at 8:59amWeb
Show threadMark GardnerFeb 6, 2023

@slightlyoff Not sure what you meant by “#1Password vulnerable”—are you confusing it with the most recent #LastPass shitshow?

/cc @dkalintsev