Dave Rupert

> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies, mentoring the other developers, helping the team to grow, but I was doing this just because I liked my job. I was not considering this as something important in my career, simply because I didn’t want too. To develop my career, I was spending a lot of time outside work reading technical books, doing toy projects, going to meetups, browsing Hacker News.

This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment.

> Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial.

A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great.

So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do…

There have been many that have hit the front page over the years. If you're not aware of a technology's shortcomings then you're a bad proponent of said technology. They're also almost the antithesis of what the HTMX crowd also preaches as "the one true way" and meanwhile, Wordpressers will continue developing the majority of the world's websites blissfully unaware that either technology even exists.

https://dev.to/ryansolid/web-components-are-not-the-future-48bh

https://dev.to/richharris/why-i-don-t-use-web-components-2cia

https://daverupert.com/2023/07/why-not-webcomponents/

https://paularmstrong.dev/blog/2023/03/11/why-we-do-not-write-web-components/

https://nolanlawson.com/2024/09/28/web-components-are-okay/

https://www.zachleat.com/web/good-bad-web-components/

https://mayank.co/blog/web-components-considered-harmful/

https://adamsilver.io/blog/the-problem-with-web-components/

https://web-highlights.com/blog/are-web-components-dead/

along with some criticisms from very knowledgeable people:

https://x.com/youyuxi/status/1839833110164504691 (author of Vue) https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1839785839036887361 (author of Svelte)

Web Components solve a few problems and introduce a few others, use them when they make sense for your needs.

Looking around his page, I see some interesting aspects on his atom page:

https://daverupert.com/atom.xml

First, he sends it with a "content-type: application/xml" header. In contrast to most sites that send it with "content-type: application/atom+xml". Which seems to have the nice effect that it renders in Firefox instead of opening the usual "What should Firefox do with this file?" popup.

Secondly, he provides this nice header text "Yahaha, you found me! This is my RSS feed.". It seems to be fetched via this part of the code:

<?xml-stylesheet href="/pretty-feed-v3.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

Pretty nice. Are those best practices? Or will "content-type: application/xml" mess with users who have a native feed reader installed and expect the reader to kick in when they click on a feed url?

I thought the most important part of the article wasn't about the missing API. ( Many of them are draft status )

It was the buggy implementation of a feature that go unfix for years [0]. It say it is supported only to find out it really doesn't. Or those one-offs, I think [1] is a much better take on the problem.

And as a Web page browser. I dont have much complain. But in terms of Web Apps.... there is where the fuss is all about.

[0]https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum/wiki/Tracker-for-External-Browser-Bugs,-Library-Bugs,-and-Features

[1] https://daverupert.com/2021/07/safari-one-offs/

Reminds me of "tech debt as a lack of understanding"

https://daverupert.com/2020/11/technical-debt-as-a-lack-of-understanding/

> If there’s been enough organizational turnover or enough feature creep in a product, then maybe doing a rewrite is the best option so your team has a collective understanding of the code. You can’t expect people to be productive in something that was a culmination of [complicated "here be dragons" code] made by people who no longer work there. At that point your technical debt balloon has popped, you are in possession of a toxic asset.

There are hiccups, but as a general statement I stand by it.

"Node is pretty impressive on Windows. You get the feeling that JavaScript (as well as HTML and CSS) are a first class citizen in the Operating System. I already have a list of dozens of Native Windows Apps I want to build using Node."

http://daverupert.com/2015/08/developing-on-windows/

(good contrast with other experiences from a polyglot)

"Node is quite awesome on Windows to be honest."

https://medium.com/@vernonk/surface-pro-4-the-ipad-i-always-wanted-and-so-much-more-eb550ff3585b