Johan Halse

Full-fat web developer since 1999

The idle elite

I’m sometimes linked to Twitter (sorry, I mean X) threads. It’s usually updates on the war in Ukraine, because Twitter is still the default medium if you want to see Russian tanks merrily tossing their turrets. That’s fine, I guess, if a little weird—why post on a medium where the proprietor is an unhinged plutocrat who is clearly aligned against you?—but every now and then I click on a link to the birdsite and it looks like some people are still on there discussing tech of all topics?

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Headwind

There seems to be a little swirl of anti-Tailwind sentiment brewing. Which is fine! All fine, I assure you. Tailwind is intensely polarizing and I don’t want to harsh anyone’s mellow. But I’m honestly getting sort of sick of the “skillful and experienced developers don’t like Tailwind because it holds them back” trope because it just ain’t true. I read a long and pretty entertaining piece yesterday that argued essentially that: Tailwind is a crutch for beginners that blunts the edge of experts. Last week I read another post that, interestingly, used the same craftsmanship metaphor.

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The best laid plans

Brandon Weaver posted a thread on Mastodon a couple of days ago stressing the importance of planning ahead in software projects, and I caught myself feeling kind of offended. I’m a super-duper senior developer who’s been in charge of projects, teams, apps, a company, released open-source, and won awards, and I’m not great at planning ahead. That means I’m not one of those “most senior and skilled leaders” from Brandon’s thread. Well, dang.

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