[eropple]

I feel like the pace of change has slowed a lot over the last few years, to be honest, and I wouldn't use that argument as a reason to not get into web development today.

I kind of divide web development into three eras: pre-jQuery, jQuery, and post-jQuery. There was a lot of thrash in the pre-jQuery-to-jQuery era; remember MooTools? my first job was using that in 2010, that sure was a time to be doing that kind of thing. I missed most of the jQuery era because I was busy building the systems that the jQuery folks talked to, so I can't speak too much about that, but it seemed relatively stable, if not static, for a long time. And just as I was getting back into web development there was also a lot of thrash in the jQuery-to-post-jQuery era; Angular 1 or Angular 2 while wearing your regulation blue tie or React cool-kids wearing sunglasses at night and you've got the Ember guys over here quietly doing things and I am contractually obligated to mention Vue or I will have between two and thirty responses saying that I forgot about Vue, it's the Ansible of the frontend world.

But at this point it seems...mostly stable? The browsers are mostly predictable and mostly cover everything the 99% case cares about, everybody's browser engine is fast enough even if it isn't fast, and the various ecosystems out there have off-the-shelf solutions for most things and the crowd of Github starrers have given the rest of us decent signals as to what we should give a real look at. I feel like debuggers have gotten a lot better, though admittedly not at the level of something like IntelliJ; I have VSCode set up to breakpoint TypeScript (aside: a lot of what made frontend/JS development suck a lot less was TypeScript winning the metaphorical war) in Firefox and the experience is pretty clean.

Build pipelines can still be bad. Kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I do this" problem, though. Happy-path pipelines seem pretty speedy, although I do most of my development on a thoroughly un-heat-throttled Linux desktop rather than the metric standard Macbook Pro.