I wrote my first line of JavaScript in 2023. I was studying economics and following Colt Steele’s bootcamp on the side, mostly because my courses were painfully boring. That’s how I discovered web development.
I learned to build a simple CRUD application using plain JavaScript, HTML templates, Bootstrap CSS, and MySQL. The setup was fast. The mental model was simple. You could actually understand what was happening.
Six years later, web development feels massively overengineered. Next.js, React, Angular, Vue, Meteor, Polymer, Astro… the list never ends.Many junior developers struggle to write a simple button that opens a modal using plain JavaScript. That’s not their fault, but it’s still sad.
Fundamentals are being skipped in favor of abstractions. I miss the time when we didn’t need 200 dependencies just to render a page. Frameworks solve real problems, but not every problem needs a framework. Why overcomplicate something that has been solved for decades?