You Hate Your Users

Developer Experience Is A Lie

It's a beautiful lie told to programmers, by programmers. It's a tale about how they shipped the project in a weekend, and how much more productive they feel. But that's what it's all about, feelings.

Your users do not care about your ultra-fast hot reloading, or the fact that you get the most intelligent intellisense ever. They care that "the thing" works. The shift towards developer experience (DX) has come at the cost of the user experience (UX), to an almost astonishing degree.

Large bundles, excessive scripts summoning corpo-demons that feed on privacy, pre-fetching data that never gets used, and giving the DOM seizures with the endless re-rendering. It's no wonder you have more microservices than users.

Were you more productive?

Are you sure? Was it the hot reloading? You probably are thinking about your precious hot reloading. Well, I've got literally zero front-end frameworks on this site. And yet, even I have hot reloading.

Was it the Google Spyware CDN? Does the spyware help you 'understand your users' better? You could get the same data without it.

If your page didn't ship a payload with enough mass that it can be measured on a kitchen scale you wouldn't need to start fetching at the instant of the user's birth. And the sin of having your layout shift, sending my click to yet another "Oh my god why did you hijack my back button you incomp..."

It doesn't have to be this way

Computers are fast. In fact, they are astoundingly fast. The internet itself is fast, and if you're reading this you are likely blessed with gigabit download speeds. So, if everything is supposedly fast...why do you insist on making it slow?

Be the change you want to see in the world. Make your software fast. Run benchmarks. Care about regression and poor user experience. Software is a craft, be a craftsman who takes pride in their work.