Alex Russell with a detailed and relatively pragmatic post on building websites in 2024. The tone is a bit ranty but there’s a lot of sensible advice underneath it for those willing to listen. It tackles some common counter-arguments as well. This one is a particular peeve of mine:
“But… we need to move fast”
This chestnut should always be answered with a question: “for how long?”
This is because the dominant outcome of fling-stuff-together-with-NPM, feels-fine-on-my-$3K-laptop development is to cause teams to get stuck in the mud much sooner than anyone expects. From major accessibility defects to brand-risk levels of lousy performance, the consequence of this sort of thinking has been crossing my desk every week for a decade now.
This shortsighted view pops up in all sorts of places, and I wish that there was less focus on development velocity and more on how usable, reliable, well-designed, and efficient software was.