Enbies and gentlefolk of the class of ‘24:
Write websites.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now:
Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP; or never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of PHP until your stack is completely jammed. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at your old sites and recall in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how simple and fast they were. JS is not as blazingly fast as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the scaling; or worry, but know that premature scalability is as useful as chewing bubble gum if your project starts cosy and small. The real troubles on the web are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; if your project grows, scale it up on some idle Tuesday.
Code one thing every day that amuses you.
Style.
Don’t be reckless with other people’s data; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
POSSE.
Don’t waste time on shiny new frameworks; sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re a trap. The web platform doesn’t need gigs of node_modules.
Remember the guestbook entries you receive; forget the spam. If you succeed in doing this well, tell me how.
Keep your old site designs. Throw away your old nested <div>s.
Flex.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your site. The most interesting websites don’t even have an introduction, never mind any blog posts. Some of the most interesting web sites I enjoy just are.
Add plenty of semantic HTML.
Be kind to your eyes, your visitors will appreciate a nice theme.
Maybe you’ll blog, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll have users, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll give up that cool domain.
Maybe you’ll sell that little project and hate what the buyers do with it.Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your code is half spaghetti; so is everybody else’s.
Enjoy your <body>. Style it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of CSS, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest design tool you’ll ever learn.
Animate, even if you only try it out in your local IDE or CodePen.
Read the documentation, even if you don’t follow it.
Do not read React dev rel articles; they will only make you feel confused.
Get to know the web platform; HTML, CSS and JS are there for good.
Be nice to your community; they are your hyperlinks that keep the web interconnected and the people who will give the web a future.
Understand that frameworks come and go, but for a precious few you should donate to the maintainers.
Work hard to bridge the gaps in accessibility and responsiveness, because the older you get, the more you need the accommodations you didn’t need when you were young.
Host on Netlify once, but leave before it makes you static.
Host on Überspace once, but leave before it makes you dynamic.
Contribute.
Accept certain inalienable truths: connection speeds will rise, techbros will grift, you too will get old— and when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young websites were light-weight, tech founders were noble and fonts used to be bigger.
Respect the W3C.
Ask for help and people will support you.
Maybe you have a patreon, maybe you have venture capital funding; but you never know when either one might run out.
Don’t mess too much with your tabbing order, or by the time you’ve got arthritis, using a keyboard will be useless.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.The old web is a form of nostalgia. Rebuilding it needs to be more than fishing the past from the disposal, painting over the inaccessible parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.
But trust me on the websites.
(It's funny comparing this to another article I ran into today: Why I'm Over GraphQL. I've never used it but it always seemed like a weirdly over (or maybe under-) engineered idea...
