What's Wrong With the Way We Think About Web Development?

Web development has an abstraction problem. The low-level implementation details have leaked all the way into code we reguarly write. It’s analogous to writing C or assembly where you need to shape your thinking in terms of the underlying architecture.

Good abstractions capture thought ideas with only as much bend as is absolutely needed to eliminate ambiguity. The ideation of a web app is in terms of the content the user can see and the interactions they can make with the website – simple. When it goes to implementation however, the developer has to think analytically and separate what goes into the frontend from what goes into the backend. This feels very artifical and low-level.

Secondly, it’s amazing how much HTML and CSS (or pseudo-CSS like Bootstrap/Tailwind/et al.) we still write. How many times has a simple Bootstrap form been created by you? By other developers? Yet we spend time doing it again, caring about its alignment and how it looks on different screen sizes. All we do care about is what content is displayed, what data is collected from a form, and what happens after submitting it. Context switching to low-level details takes our attention away from these things.

Thirdly, our database abstractions are not there yet. Databases are part of our webapps by necessity rather than choice. They bring complexity with them. To maintain them, we have to keep a schema and migrations. We have to write SQL queries that are performant and at the same time compatible with higher-level language abstractions. It’s a tricky problem to solve. ORMs bring in a different kind of complexity and often end up hiding performance bottlenecks. For example when you want only the username, an ORM will likely load all other user data in one shot. The magic they add could have side effects like loading data from JOINs that won’t be used later.

When I presented my thoughts to a group of developers coming in from varying backgrounds and levels of experience, I was confronted with arguments that justified this complexity. My pipe dream is one where a “web developer” without design expertise (me) is equipped with tools to build complex, maintainable production grade web apps where they can focus on the important parts only. Even with these counter-arguments, I felt that my frustration was justified and in fact even shared by other developers. I wasn’t happy with any of the existing solutions that were mentioned – Liveview, Hotwire, Isomorphic Javascript.