Books and standup comedy are the rare mediums that are usually created by a single person. Because of this they can be more daring and go to more interesting places than their big budget Hollywood versions. I think single creator/small team apps can be like that too.

i think about this a lot, and how the higher barrier to entry makes it less appealing for students to get into designing digital products

To me building software is pretty daunting to begin compared to say graphic design. I think that leads to to the medium feeling a little less "diy" which turned me away from it as a design student. Agree it's easier than ever right now though.

Ya the initial learning curve is def steeper bc of coding. What I love about the accidental/evolutionary design of the web is that web apps are just fancy web pages, so making/customizing personal sites/blogs on geocities etc tricked a lot of us into the beginning of a dev path

Getting your head around state and flow is hard, particularly as people can use it in ways you can’t imagine and in environments you can’t control. (That last part is less so these days with the homogenisation of browser engines - I cut my teeth in the heyday of ie6)

That’s true - although there’s no hard and fast rule that Requires us to use a fancy state framework. Lots of great apps were once made with just jquery (and now you don’t even that). To prevent paralysis, we should promote plain js is fine for v1)

Agree on that. I was thinking more conceptually as a designer: how to handle error states, low/connection drop off etc All which can be tricky to know about when starting

I remember how easy it was to get a simple webpage out in the early 00s. You didn’t need an engineering degree to build and “deploy“ a static page 😂 you’d write a bunch of html and css in a file and ftp it to a server or upload it to geocities. Done 😂

But I also appreciate how many more tools there are for people to learn and try things out, it feels like there’s both more and less gate keeping, at the same time. Schrödinger’s web 🙃

Luckily FTP, HTML, CSS is still a very viable stack - I think the thing was the web was a truly smaller place back then, now discoverability in the noise is the puzzle.

I love the way you phrased it, Nick. That truly is the puzzle 🥺 I get overwhelmed just opening anything (social media, random news platform, etc) in my browser sometimes. Maybe this is why I still enjoy Posts so much, because it feels very “cosy-web”

Same! Very cozy 😊🍵