If you've found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here's something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system (so no npm / React / TypeScript / JSX / Babel / Vite / Tailwind etc) and code in HTML and JavaScript like it's 2009.
The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.
You don't even need jQuery to paper over the gaps any more - use document.querySelectorAll()
and fetch()
directly and see how much value you can build with a few dozen lines of code.
Recent articles
- My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
- Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025
- GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search - 6th September 2025