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I was perhaps thinking about dark matter when I read this tweet from Andy Bell.
Interesting results. 1933 respondents with 78% using Sass or vanilla CSS.
Seeing Sass pull 49% confirms some theories of mine that _a lot_ of folks are still using it.
CSS-in-JS pulling a meagre 16% reminds me that as per, the (very) loud minority are really are a minority. https://t.co/1QzTq6KunY
— Andy Bell (@andybelldesign) July 29, 2019
The vast majority of respondents are still using Sass and vanilla CSS? Wow! This made me pause and think. Because I feel there’s an analogy here between that unseen dark matter, and the huge crowd of web developers who are using such “boring” technology stacks.
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This! As a well-established developer who gets things done with a handful of solid, reliable, tried-and-tested toolsets, I’ve sometimes felt like I must be “falling behind” on the hot-new-tech curve because I can’t keep up with whichever yet-another-Javascript-framework is supposed to be hip this week. Earlier in my career, I didn’t have this problem. And it’s not just that we’re inventing new libraries, frameworks, and (even) languages faster than ever before – and I’m pretty sure we are – nor is it that my thirty-something brain is less-plastic than the brain of my twenty-something younger self… it’s simpler than that: it’s that the level of productivity that’s expected of an engineer of my level of seniority precludes me from playing with more than a couple of new approaches each year. I try, and I manage, to get a working understanding of a new language and a framework or two most years, and I appreciate that that’s more than I’m expected to do (and more than many will), but it still feels like a drop in the ocean: there’s always a “new hotness”.
But when I take the time to learn a “new hotness”, these days, nine times out of ten it doesn’t “stick” for me. Why? Because most of the new technologies we seem to be inventing don’t actually add anything to the vast majority of use cases. Hipper (and often smarter) developers than me might latch on to the latest post-reational database or the most-heavyweight CSS-in-JS-powered realtime web framework, and they dominate the online discussion, but that doesn’t make their ideas right for my projects. They’re a loud minority with a cool technology, and I’m a little bit jealous that they have the time to learn and play with it… but I’ll just keep delivering value with the tools I’ve got, thanks.