Is web development boring?
I read an article a month or two ago in php|architect magazine that got me thinking. The article is entitled Slot Machines and it’s an editorial by Steph Fox. In the article, Steph talks about electrical engineering before the age of the microchip and how it was an exciting and creative career path. However, after the microchip hit the market it became a “…boring: slot this here, slot that there” profession. Basically the creativity had been replaced with interchangable parts. The article draws the similarity between electrical engineering after the advent of the microchip and web development. It argues that there is little ‘real’ development that needs to be done anymore with all the COTS applications and programming frameworks on the market and it begged the question: is web development boring?
After thinking about the article for a while I decided my favorite part of development isn’t writing the code anyway it’s the entire process. Coming up with the idea, determining what features to include and then shepherding the project through the numerous cycles of design, development, testing, marketing, etc. I totally agree that web development has changed since the popularity of frameworks and surge of readily available 3rd party applications but I think that has made it all that much more exciting.
In today’s day in age there is no real compelling reason to write your own database access or session handler. Not when there are an overwhelming number of frameworks and 3rd party libraries that have been rigorously tested and refined by a community. But I don’t think that makes web development dull… at least for me anyway. I think it makes it better. You are no longer bogged down with the repetition of building the common pieces to every program, you can focus on what makes your application unique.
What do you think… is web development boring?
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I’ve been a programmer for 31 years. Most of the years were coding in assembler, and eventually on to C, then C++, then Java, and now so many languages and frameworks they’re too numerous to name.
But I think web development is very boring. Part of that is because for me the coding is the best part. I love to build and refine code! The idea, the application, even the graphics do nothing for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some curmudgeon luddite railing on the modern world. I’ve embraced the graphical world wholeheartedly. But nothing brings the excitement as much as those abstract things that touch on the real science: thread management, device drivers, algorithms, et cetera, are the things I find the most interesting. But those skills are not widely sought and are really a niche anymore.
The problem with web development is it lends itself more to those with artistic flairs and less for those entrenched in computer science. But that’s just my perspective.
Hi Chris
I think repetitive development is boring but as you said, you build up classes, libraries to shorten the coding aspect, however, you will always find developers still re-writing the wheel for their specific app etc…(some just doing it for the sake of it too
) Kind of funny in a way that this still goes on.
We are still nowhere near getting combined programming languages so a common language can replace the menagerie of languages, learning curves, quirks etc..
What we should be working to is something of that ilk so the boredom or repetitiveness can be lessened, we can all work from the same page and then focus on the journey of creating uniqueness of the quest