Fancy Frameworks and Trendy Tech

I wonder if in a few years coding to spec will come back in style and I’ll have to start wearing skinny jeans and using a Mac. I kinda hope not. Coding to spec instead of trying to fit the spec into a subset of pre-existing modules is a nice niche. MVC and such are nice conventions, but public conventions can be a security risk in and of themselves. Sure you can call them “standards” but having predated social media driven “standards” doesn’t mean we didn’t have “standards” we just had to understand them much better than the fanfare of today’s pretentious “guru” atmosphere. We had to actually code to spec.

I really gave “test-driven” development a shot… but what a laugh! It’s like having to do everything twice. I imagine that’s important for beginners, but after 20 years of coding I’ll just do it right the first time thanks. The first time you spend an hour debugging someone else’s “test” you’ll have to question if there really is a baby in that nasty bath water.

It’s amazing how lean and mean code written for the spec can be compared to the bloat of piles of libraries just to get started with some packages. JavaScript is super easy and super powerful, yet how many people import JQuery just because they can’t code a 5 line function? Or for some reason believe they can’t maintain browser compatibility? Don’t they know that compatibility bugs in JQuery can last months? Any that show up in your function should take less time to fix than installing a new version of JQuery.

Alas, I’m afraid we’re bound to come full circle. After the last just-another-web-framework comes along and the déjà vu is undeniable, someone with skinny jeans, dark rimmed glasses, and a shirt that ensures that he cannot tie his shoes without mooning someone; that guy will profoundly declare to his bazillion Twitter zombies that coding to spec is the new bleeding edge. We just need to wait long enough for everyone to forget that option ever existed.