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

Do you have specific barriers in mind here? In some ways the barriers have never been both lower in some ways and higher in others 🤔

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)

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