The Beauty & Beast of the Web (spoiler alert, it's the same thing!)

I work on the web, and that’s great, but sometimes it can be really frustrating. The web is one of the fastest changing and growing industries, and that’s awesome. If I didn’t care about pushing my own limits and the limits of my team as to what our websites can do, then it wouldn’t be all that frustrating, but the ever-changing nature of the web can be very frustrating. 

I’m currently working on a project using some new JavaScript libraries, and as a team we are pushing our skills and working with new and exciting technologies. We are learning a lot of valuable skills, and we will be able to do even cooler new things on our next project; implementing these cutting-edge technologies on a large-scale production site is a beautiful thing. There isn’t a single person that I work with who doesn’t like to learn and get better at what they do, I love it. However, because things on the web change so quickly, and because we are doing so many new things, we often have nobody to ask for help when we hit a wall. 

There have been more than a few times on this project when I have had to figure out the best way to do something on my own. I’m a better developer because of it! The beast of the web is that because it evolves so fast, there can be times when nobody around you has a good answer to your problem or question. I’m going to blow the lid on the whole web development community: trial and error happens. I haven’t met a developer who knows the exact way to write a certain piece of code with the exact desired results the very first time they try it, so there are times in our days when we test some code and think “Hmm, I wonder if this is going to work the exact way I expect it to.” It’s almost guaranteed that the first way I get something to work isn’t going to be the way it works in production. Our code ends up with lots of moving parts that all work with each other, and when it’s finally ready to ship, it is going to work like a well-oiled machine.

So the beauty of the web is that it changes every day, and there is always something new to learn that didn’t even exist yesterday, but that is also what makes the web a beast. It can be very frustrating looking for answers in the corners of the internet, trying to do something a dozen different ways, and ending the day with very little progress, but when it finally works the way it should, and we have a new tool in our tool belt, we feel an exciting rush. We are constantly learning new skills as we improve our existing ones, and that’s how we are able to push out better products with each new project.

The web is so cool, don’t you think?