Sometimes I feel the least empathy coming from those who are working to push the web forward.
….A question is never an opening to a conversation, but an opening to a link to their blog post on the topic. Or silence. Or worse, “it depends.” It depends…on what? because? why? “It depends” has got to be the most frustrating answer in the universe, because it is not an answer at all, but the gateway to a thousand other questions that are then left unanswered.
….Being “sick and tired” of X is typically a sign of burnout, isn’t it? Only not in the web world. In this world, it’s a platform that too often feels like the demonization of one method due to preference for another.
….I like being pushed to do better, but please don’t lecture me about doing the heavy lifting (i.e., accessibility) when I can easily look at your code and see that you haven’t made a single thing accessible. Why don’t more developers make their code accessible by default? Let’s talk about that in another blog post, but if you’re asking that question to begin with, it shows me that you don’t actually understand the current state of accessibility at all.
I suppose it’s good, in a way, finding out that no one really has any more answers than you; they’ve just sat down longer and thought about one particular question until the answer is clear to them. Only in doing so, they’ve generally left the rest of the questions behind. No one is farther ahead, they are just at different places in the journey.
I will not preach about these perceived shortcomings myself; instead, I will resolve to do it differently.
I resolve, then, to:
- Give better answers than “it depends” (how about, “if X, then 1; if Y then 2”)
- Lead by example
- Not single out a particular technology/framework just because I think there is something “wrong” with it
- Continue to be willing to be wrong
- Continue to ask questions and think deeply about possible answers
This is NOT to say that I don’t have my preferences. However, this stems more from a specific personal author experience. Specific example: I prefer Ember over Angular in an enterprise environment because I found Ember to be more opinionated and as a result, better for large teams with varying levels of developer talent (which is definitely today’s enterprise environment).
I want to continue to cultivate deeply genuine honesty and self-reflection, while maintaining the staunch determination to craft quality into my code. So that’s what I’m going to do.